Louisiana Democrats are looking for a little election insurance by their complaints that there's some sort of discrimination going on in dropping voters off rolls for failure to verify their information, part of a longer-term plan launched months ago where the charges have only political, not factual, bases

In front of a Louisiana legislative committee, a party operative claimed something fishy was going on, alleging something was amiss with a disproportionate elimination of "non-Republicans" from eligible voter rolls. After the books close for an election date, registrars are empowered to identify questionable registrations and ask for confirmation. If none is received, the doubted registration is cancelled.

The numbers, however, tell a different story. Statewide, the proportion of Democrats struck from the rolls was about 3.5 percent higher than their statewide proportion of the electorate, for Republicans it was about the same lower, and it was about identical for other and no party registrants. Certainly the allegation that "non-Republicans" were disproportionately struck was false, but had to be made to hide the partisan overtones of the complaint.

Accounting for the small difference for the two major parties, besides the obvious fact that, socioeconomically speaking, Democrats typically are on the lower end of the scale and therefore more likely to be transient, this time out the higher rate may be due to activities such as special interests running registration drives that had a high degree of questionable registration requests in the first place. Months ago, Louisiana Democrats tacitly approved of the efforts of Project Vote, affiliated with the radical Association for Community Reform Now (ACORN, once associated with Sen. Barack Obama prior to and early in his political career), and of another group allied with them called Voting is Power, to turn in as many new registrations as possible. Containing as many as a third bogus requests, the strategy was to overwhelm registrars in the hopes that it would dull efforts to challenge the less obvious questionable information to allow those who otherwise might be ineligible to vote to be eligible for mobilization and voting on election day. Alert registrars may have snuffed this strategy since the drives were targeted at signing up people who demographically typically register as Democrats.

(Where registrars choose to be alert, that is, this happens. It would be interesting to know how many challenges were attempted in Orleans Parish, a Democrat stronghold, where recently as many other urban parishes would routinely remove thousands of names in this process its registrar would remove just a handful. It's also interesting to note that only since Secretary of State Jay Dardenne got into office have registrars begun much more aggressive checks. Why weren't Democrats concerned about the process back when it hardly seemed to work?)

This incident is just the final part of the Democrat strategy - wink at the overburdening of registrars, then try to dissuade them from doing their jobs by crying about some mythical unfairness. This is what played out, and we should expect to see it replayed in the years to come.

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