Not Your Average Joe

In a presidential campaign replete with rock stars and rising stars, an ordinary citizen stepped out his front door, asked Barack Obama a question about his tax plan, and became “an instant star.”

A study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, aka Joe the Plumber, drove campaign coverage last week:

It was during that debate that the legend of Joe the Plumber was born. And almost immediately, the press descended on the home of Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, who seemed to enjoy the exposure until reporters began probing his political views, employment status, and a tax lien filed against him. An October 16 ABC report declared that “the networks battled over him as if he were Britney,” adding that by the end of the week, “Joe was already feeling the flip side of fame.”

John McCain is exploiting Wurzelbacher’s celebrity, such as it is. His campaign is plumbing the depths with an “I’m ‘Joe the Plumber’” video contest. The best video could end up in a TV ad.

In one respect, though, Wurzelbacher is average. His name is misspelled in the voter database. He's been registered to vote since 1992 so he's not at risk of being challenged on Election Day.

But 200,000 newly registered Ohioans were nearly kicked off the voter rolls. A new report by the Brennan Center for Justice found:

Some states will not register voters or will purge them from the voter rolls if election officials cannot match their voter registration information against information in other government databases. The problem is the computer match processes states use are inherently unreliable. Between 15% and 30% of all match attempts fail because of typos, other administrative errors, and minor discrepancies between database records, such as a maiden name in one record and a married name in another or a hyphen in one record and not another. No match, no vote policies can block hundreds of thousands of voters through no fault of their own.

If the U.S. Supreme Court had not quashed Republicans' efforts to challenge voters whose name did not match with government databases, a lot of average Joes and Josephines would have been left standing in long lines – again.