The hill Barack Obama will have to climb to win Indiana got a little bit steeper this week, after the Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita announced that he had purged over 1 million voters from the state’s rolls — 26% of all registered voters in the state — on the eve of Obama’s square off with Hillary Clinton in the state’s Democratic primary. More ominous: the biggest purges — totaling more than a quarter million registered voters — are in just two northwestern Indiana counties: Lake and Porter. Lake County the home of Gary, Indiana, has one of the heaviest concentrations of African-American voters that you’ll find anywhere in the USA. The Secretary of State reports purging 137,164 voters there. Neighboring Porter County, more conservative but with a large population of college students, cancelled out 124,958 voters, according to an email from Blackboxvoting.org, which was reposted on the expose Website Cryptome.org. A county by county tally of the 1 million voter purges are detailed in a PDF posted on the Secretary of State’s Web site here.
Republican-dominated Indiana has figured prominently in the “voter fraud” debate. The state was the defendant in a recent Supreme Court ruling that upheld voter ID laws that many feel will disenfranchise poor voters, who don’t own cars, are indigent or otherwise lack official identification or the means to obtain it. The state appears to have had its black markers at hand when that ruling came down: the document detailing voter purges is dated April 30, just two days after the Supreme Court ruling upholding Indiana’s stringent voter registration laws.
Prediction: Obama will lose Indiana amid reports of mass confusion at the polls, esp. in counties with urban centers that were the target of the most aggressive voter purges. According to Blackboxvoting, they are:
Lake 137,164 voters purged (Gary)
Porter 124,958 voters purged (Valparaiso)
Marion 68,120 voters purged (Indianapolis)
Monroe 66,009 voters purged (Bloomington)
Tippecanoe 53,456 voters purged
Madison 42,952 voters purged (Anderson)
Hamilton 42,325 26%
those areas where large scale purges have taken placed
