In
anticipation of voting in the April 19, 2016, presidential primary in
New York, Kathleen Menegozzi checked her registration online. The
Brooklyn resident, a registered Democrat since 2008, learned three
weeks before the election that she had been struck from the rolls.
Another Brooklyn Democrat, Casey James Diskin, who first joined the
party in 2012, discovered five days before the primary that he was
not registered at all.
In
Manhattan, Michael Hubbard, a Democrat since 2015, checked his status
online 17 days before planning to vote, only to find that he too was
no longer registered. Meanwhile, in Queens, Benjamin Leo Gersh, who
also had been a registered Democrat since 2015, checked on his voter
status, and saw two weeks before the primary that he too had been
purged.
Then-New
York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman would eventually reveal that
they were among 200,000 New York City voters who had been illegally
wiped off the rolls and prevented from voting in the presidential
primary. But by January of 2017, when Schneiderman announced that he
would intervene in a federal lawsuit against the New York City Board
of Elections, along with the U.S. Department of Justice, the news
fell on deaf ears.
The
announcement had come just seven days after President Donald Trump’s
inauguration. Although it was the first time the total number of
purged voters had been disclosed, the media was consumed with a
different statistic: the crowd size at Trump’s inauguration. At
the same time, a snowballing narrative that Russia had hacked the
U.S. election would overshadow the indisputable fact that a domestic
government agency had committed election fraud.
The lack
of media attention was in stark contrast to the recent barrage of
headlines about a right-wing push to purge eligible voters from the
rolls. Much of the media ignored New York’s proven case of election
fraud, perhaps because it had been facilitated by Democrats, and not
by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Republican with a
national profile for championing stricter voter ID legislation.
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