Duran Duran is the evil villain in the comic strip and film "Barbarella". Just sayin'.

OK... so he lives in Albuquerque. But is he hungry? Like de wolf?

The song "Election Day" was by Arcadia, not Duran Duran.

I know, same singer, same guitar player, but it's altogether different.

My sister graduated in 1959 at a high school in Albuquerque and one of her classmates name was David David. Wouldn't they also go nuts with that real person's name? I do not know if he still lives in NM.

Funny as this is, it highlights a more serious point - that these claims of fraud, and efforts to match data, tend to have a more significant negative effect on persons with names that are not considered "traditional," and there's often a racial effect. On Latinos, for example, who use 2 last names (that was gonna be my guess of the Duran Duran thing), or African-Americans with unusual name spellings. Just look what's happening in Florida.

http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20081018/ARTICLE/810180341/-1/NEWSSITEMAP
Law rejects many voters

By Todd Ruger

Published: Saturday, October 18, 2008 at 1:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Saturday, October 18, 2008 at 1:19 a.m.

A state voter verification law has rejected almost 9,000 new voter registrations in Florida for this presidential election, including 256 in Sarasota, Manatee and Charlotte Counties.

Of those local registrations, more than four times as many Democrats as Republicans had their registration rejected since the law went into effect Sept. 8. More than a third were minorities, according to a state database released this week.

Those numbers match statewide trends for the law, often called "no match, no vote," which compares information from the voter registration to other state databases in a search for bad registrations.

The search flagged 8,867 voter registrations statewide, more than half of which came from blacks and Hispanics, while nearly half were Democrats.

Those voters still have until the election to show additional proof they are legitimate voters. Otherwise, they can vote by provisional ballot on Election Day and make the case in the next two days.

In the meantime, election officials will look at those registrations to determine why there was a discrepancy with the voter's name or a number -- either the driver's license number or the last four digits of the Social Security number.

It is not surprising that the law flags minorities, because of naming conventions in minority cultures, said Adam Skaggs of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law.

He used similar disproportionate results from the "no match" law to lead a legal challenge in 2007 that suspended the law until July, when a federal judge's court order upheld the law.

The reason for the results is that the black community has a high number of unique or derivative spellings of names, while Hispanics often use compound last names, Skaggs said.

"If the name is different than traditional spelling, and the government clerk types it in wrong, it's not going to match," Skaggs said.

"This is an issue that has been identified by scholars who study database matching well before it was used in voting."

Many times, a clerk made an error entering the name or someone used a nickname, state officials said.

The rejected registrations this year come from about 350,000 new registrations since Sept. 8.

Both political parties have been pushing new voter registrations for the upcoming presidential election in Florida, which is considered a close race.

Of the 256 registrations rejected in Sarasota, Manatee and Charlotte counties, 121, or 47 percent, registered as Democrats; while 27, or 11 percent, registered as Republicans. The party of 58 people was listed as unknown.

In Sarasota County, where the U.S. Census estimates 6.8 percent of the population to be non-white, minorities accounted for 37 percent of the rejected registrations.