'Exact match' law could disenfranchise 909K eligible GA voters

By Ted Enamorado
October 20 at 7:00 AM

... Georgia’s ... “exact match” law, passed last year, requires that citizens’ names on their government-issued IDs must precisely match their names as listed on the voter rolls ...

Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, a Republican who is running for governor against Democrat Stacey Abrams, has put on hold more than 53,000 voters so far, given mismatches in the names in their voting records and other sources of identification such as driver’s licenses and Social Security cards. If the measure takes effect, voters whose information does not exactly match across sources will need to bring a valid photo ID to the polls on Election Day to vote. That could suppress voter turnout ...

... I have spent the past three years helping to develop an algorithm that uses probabilistic record linkage .. that not only makes record linkage across data sets speedy and automated, but also tells the analyst how likely it is that an inexact match of two records is actually correct.

In a recent study co-authored with colleagues Ben Fifield and Kosuke Imai, we apply the algorithm to the question of voter identification. The results raise serious concerns about Georgia’s exact match law — and its likelihood of preventing tens of thousands of valid voters from casting ballots ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/10/20/georgias-exact-match-law-could-disenfranchise-3031802-eligible-voters-my-research-finds/?utm_term=.da530ddcb179