A state official admitted that at least 20,000 names were removed in violation of a federal court order.

Indiana has removed at least 20,000 registered voters from its voter rolls in violation of a federal court order, according to investigative journalist Greg Palast.

In all, the state has purged 469,000 voters from the rolls using suspect methods.

> A team of database experts, statisticians, lawyers and investigators working with the Palast Investigative Fund discovered — and Indiana now admits — that these thousands of voters were cancelled in violation of a June 2018 federal court order that barred the state from using the notorious Interstate Crosscheck purge list sent to state officials by Kris Kobach, Secretary of State of Kansas.



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> The court order stemmed from a suit by the NAACP and League of Woman Voters against a 2017 Indiana law ordering counties to remove voters if they appear on Kobach’s list which purports to identify voters who have left the state. The NAACP and League cited the Palast team’s evidence in our 2016 Rolling Stone article showing that Crosscheck is overwhelmingly wrong in identifying voters who have moved — and extremely racist in operation.

When approached by the Palast Investigative Fund’s attorneys, a state official acknowledged the court order must have been violated:

> Rachel Garbus, researcher with Mirer Mazzocchi & Julien, our New York based attorneys, asked a top Indiana official for the reason our database experts found 27,000 voters purged whose names appeared on the Crosscheck list of voters who allegedly left the state. Post Office files indicate only 7,000 of them have moved.



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> The official agreed that the only reasonable explanation was a violation of the court order against using Crosscheck, though he considered the error inadvertent.



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> “I’m just speculating, but it is possible that some counties used the 2017 legislation so were cancelling voters using that method.”



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> The official’s “speculation” is doubtless correct as there is no other explanation for the wrongful purge of over 20,000 citizens other than a violation of the court order overturning that 2017 law.

But the problem is actually far worse than the 20,000 removals to which the official admitted: in total, Indiana has purged 469,000 voters using suspect methods.

> The problems, say our experts, go way beyond the violation of the federal court order. A name-by-name analysis indicates the vast majority of the nearly half million purged remain Indiana residents who should not have lost their rights..

> The Palast Investigative Fund, which obtained the list after sending a formal notice that, unless Indiana opens its files, the state will be hauled into another federal suit under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. Indiana is one of 26 states receiving notice of suit resulting in a flood of responses now being analyzed by our investigations team.

Read more here.