As a key deadline approaches next week on updating statewide voter rolls before the November election, it appears a controversial data-mining operation mostly used by red states to purge legitimate voters is withering, or at least dormant, in 2018. The Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck program, known as Crosscheck, has been blasted in the press, academia,legal briefs, and federal court rulings for sloppy analytics that generate tens or hundreds of thousands of suspected duplicate voter registrations in member states. (It uses few data specifics, including common names, producing false positives.) Some of those states have used Crosscheck’s analyses to turn a bland voter roll bookkeeping process (removing dead people, people who moved) into a partisan cudgel. This June, a federal district court issued a restraining order against Indiana election officials to not use Crosscheck to prematurely purge its voter rolls.

Recent national reports about purge trends, such as “Purges: A Growing Threat to the Right to Vote,” from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, have detailed Crosscheck’s sloppy methodology and anti-participatory impact. For example, the Brennan report noted that Virginia’s use of Crosscheck’s data in 2013 (when the GOP dominated the state’s executive branch and legislature) resulted in up to a 17 percent error rate.

However, the Indiana ruling and Brennan report (the Brennan Center is part of the team suing Indiana) also contain revelations about Crosscheck’s downward spiral, if not its possible demise. That storyline runs counter to the widespread progressive narrative that voter purges are an enduring and widespread threat in American elections — including in 2018’s midterms.

At the very least, Brennan’s report suggests that Crosscheck is withering in 2018.

“The entire Republican Party machinery has converged on this suburban Columbus district for a furious eleventh-hour campaign aimed at saving a conservative House seat and averting another special election disaster,” Politico reports.

“But in the final days ahead of Tuesday’s election, signs were everywhere that Democrats are surging — from recent polling to the private and public statements of many Republicans, including the GOP candidate himself. The district has been reliably red for more than three decades, but the sheer size of the Republican cavalry made clear how worried the party is about losing it.”

Grant Young, a former mayor of Valley Park, characterized Kobach’s attitude as, “Let’s find a town that’s got some issues or pretends to have some issues, let’s drum up an immigration problem and maybe I can advance my political position, my political thinking and maybe make some money at the same time.”

It was quite a scheme. Kobach, before his rise to national prominence as a far-right opponent of voting rights and illegal immigration, would go from community to community, urging local officials to pass anti-immigration ordinances. He focused his energies on “small, largely white municipalities overwhelmed by real or perceived demographic shifts,” where his message fell on fertile ground.

Kobach pitched proposals that made it effectively impossible for undocumented immigrants to live or work in the area. When local officials agreed, and the ordinances faced legal challenges, Kobach would make himself available to defend the local laws in court.

The results were disastrous for everyone involved – except Kobach. Local communities ended spending money they couldn’t afford to defend bad anti-immigration laws, which they didn’t really need, and which kept failing in the courts.


All the while, Kobach kept collecting lucrative legal fees from the local officials who made the mistake of listening to him in the first place. The Kansas City Star/ProPublica report highlighted a series of cities and towns that were burdened by hefty legal bills – one Nebraska community “raised property taxes to pay for Kobach’s services” – though none of the original ordinances is still in effect.