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Election Day Registration
By Lee Rowland – 10/18/11
Sometimes political operatives go too far. Opponents of Maine’s long-standing and popular same-day voter registration system killed it in the legislature this year – but they still have to face an unhappy public at the polls. Sadly, their main campaign tactic appears to be producing lists that smear the good names of Maine residents, and the integrity of the state’s elections, with unfounded insinuations of election crimes.
First there was the list of 206: 206 students living at the University of Maine, who had come to identify Maine as their new home, but paid out-of-state tuition under the University’s strict rules. Suddenly a politician holds a press conference, and their hometowns, initials, and birth dates appear on a blacklist of students that “may have committed voter fraud.” The secretary of state then folded this list into a serious criminal investigation, which proceeded in spite of the easily-discovered fact that the sole criterion used to compile it – that the 206 paid out-of-state tuition – has nothing to do with their eligibility to vote in Maine.
The secretary recently confirmed that his investigation of the list revealed no evidence of fraud, but inexplicably, even as he affirmed that students have every legal right to vote where they live, he questioned their patriotism for doing so. The ACLU of Maine and allied organizations wrote Maine Secretary of State Charles Summers today, demanding he send a new letter clarifying these voters’ rights and correcting the record.
Then came the list of 19: 19 young adults who availed themselves of Maine’s longstanding tradition of election day registration in 2004. But these voters registered from a nontraditional residence – the Holiday Inn. Rather than simply ask “why?” partisans started pounding tables in September, using this “uncovered” evidence as proof that Mainers should vote to uphold the repeal of same-day registration.
It took a simple phone call to discover that during the 2004 school year, the entire Holiday Inn was, in fact, a St. Joseph’s College dorm housing transfer students whose campus had been ravaged by Hurricane Ivan. Long after the hotel confirmed this fact to the media, the press release “revealing” these students remains on a state political party’s website, ignoring the far less scandalous truth. The only thing these 19 Mainers appear to be guilty of is having had the gall to be displaced by a natural disaster during an election year.
These are two new verses in the same old tune.
The Brennan Center for Justice has monitored and investigated claims of voter fraud for years. We have consistently found that accusations of voter fraud are amplified out of all proportion to reality, and that they frequently reach a crescendo when their appearance would assist one side in a bitter political fight over elections.
Cavalier accusations that someone “may have” committed a crime come at a real price. One Maine student from the list of 206 has written that he fears his future reputation will be tarnished by his name’s quickly-deduced association with a serious election crime. And the victims are not only the targeted students, but every Maine student who hears serious criminal accusations tossed around by politicos and thinks twice about voting in such an intimidating atmosphere. Would you risk casting a perfectly legal ballot if you thought your tuition status or dorm residence might just win you a spot on the next public blacklist?
There’s a reason that opponents of same-day registration couch their accusations with disclaimers, clear their targets of crimes but call them unpatriotic, or use words like “uncovered” without actually identifying a wrong. It’s simple: there’s no proof any of these students did a single thing wrong. Maine’s election law includes numerous safeguards to prevent fraudulent registrations on election day or any other day. The Maine Town and City Clerks Association – the front line protecting Maine’s election integrity - testified that they were concerned the repeal of same-day registration would disenfranchise voters, not protect them. For 37 years, Maine clerks have successfully registered thousands of voters on election day.
That’s why lists built on misinformation and innuendo are the best arguments that same-day registration opponents have to wield.
There is one list that is relevant to the debate over election day registration – the list of 50,000. More than 50,000 Mainers relied on same-day registration to vote in 2008 on days now eliminated under the law. Indeed, as the Bangor Daily News reported, Mainers who have taken advantage of same-day registration include nine lawmakers who voted to repeal it and Governor LePage, who signed the bill into law. Despite the claims of opponents, there’s no evidence that any of these voters did so fraudulently – just conveniently.
So when the next trumped-up accusation of fraud hits the media – and it will – watch as these claims unravel after even the most cursory investigation. Maine deserves better than election policies founded on scare tactics.
Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Allegations of Voter Fraud, Election Day Registration, Student Voting
By Megan Brown – 10/18/11
You may have heard the stories coming out of Maine – but we want you to know the truth.
In July, a politician publicized a list of 206 students paying out-of-state tuition at Maine universities, calling the fact that they voted in Maine “evidence of voter fraud.” The Maine Secretary of State investigated these claims and unsurprisingly found that these students did not commit voter fraud – out-of-state tuition status is simply not a bar to registering or voting in Maine.
In early September, a state political party publicly “uncovered” the fact that 19 students had listed a hotel address on their voter registration cards. However, at that time the hotel was operating as a dorm for students displaced by a hurricane. Under Maine law, students may register to vote using their school address, whether it’s a dormitory, apartment, or house – so long as they consider it their home. There is no evidence these students did anything other than vote where they lived.
Now the Secretary of State has sent letters to Maine students paying out-of-state tuition – yes, the same students who were cleared of all wrongdoing in his investigation – and is asking them to obtain a driver’s license or car registration in Maine if they intend to vote there even though there is no standalone requirement to get a Maine driver’s license unless you intend to drive a car in Maine. The targeted way in which this rule is being enforced against students is unwarranted.
When the initial investigation was announced, we sent Secretary Summers a letter cautioning him against publicizing information that might wrongly intimidate student voters. Today, the ACLU of Maine, along with other voting rights groups, sent a letter to the Maine Secretary of State urging him to stop this continued intimidation of student voters.
No eligible voter should be dissuaded from voting due to misinformation and innuendo. We at the Brennan Center want students to have correct and complete information about their right to participate in the political process. In order to know the truth about voting in Maine, you can refer to the Brennan Center’s Maine Student Voting Guide which provides descriptions of the latest ID, residency, voter registration, and absentee balloting requirements.
Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Allegations of Voter Fraud, Election Day Issues, Election Day Registration, Student Voting
By Lawrence Norden – 11/02/09
Originally published in the Columbus Dispatch, 10/29/09
Elections in Ohio can produce controversy that is sometimes corrosive to the public's perception of the integrity of our electoral system. As long as Ohio remains a politically important and closely divided state, there will continue to be hotly contested election-related disputes. But changes to election law in Ohio can minimize the frequency and impact of some of these controversies by creating clearer and fairer laws that improve election administration, decrease burdens and costs on county election offices and put the voters first. The Ohio House Committee on Elections and Ethics is considering legislation that should make progress on all of these fronts.
In December and March, I chaired two summits on Ohio Election reform. Each involved a convening of ideologically diverse election officials, academics and voting-rights groups to reflect on ways to make Ohio elections run better. Those assembled agreed that, because of the hard work of election administrators, voting-rights groups and Ohio voters, the 2008 elections were largely a success. There was, however, consensus that more could be done.
The elections-enhancement bill sponsored by Reps. Dan Stewart and Tracy Heard, both Democrats from Columbus, takes many suggestions from the summits. It would improve laws related to early voting, provisional ballots, voter ID and ballot design -- all sources of problems in Ohio in the past.
But the current bill doesn't fully address flaws in the state's voter-registration system, which participants at both summits decried as inefficient and prone to error. Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner and the bipartisan workgroup she pulled together after the summit have proposed a way to fill that gap: an automatic and online voter-registration system.
This system would make it possible to automatically forward registration information from all Ohio residents who interact with a designated government agency to election officials, who could then include such information on the state's voter rolls of eligible residents. This would vastly increase administrative efficiency and reduce the stress on election officials from the typical last-minute deluge of voter-registration forms, smoothing out the flow of registration activity across the year and freeing up resources for other critical election-administration tasks. And, it would improve both the quality and security of voter-registration information and preserve registrars' traditional function of determining eligibility.
Research by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law shows that automatic voter registration could easily be developed from statewide voter-registration databases already in place. Delaware recently implemented automatic registration from its motor-vehicles agency; the state's elections and motor-vehicles officials have expressed great satisfaction with the results. Ohio's Bureau Of Motor Vehicles already participates in automatic registration for the Selective Service, and the same technology can easily be adapted for voter registration. Many other major democracies, including Canada, automatically register eligible citizens to vote, achieving far more complete and accurate voter rolls at lower cost.
The elements needed for an online registration system are firmly in place in Ohio. The state has a secure online interface that residents can use to check their existing registration status; currently, however, the state doesn't provide a way residents can correct or amend information. And, Ohio's Motor Vehicles Bureau already has digitized the information needed to register drivers to vote; they simply need legal authority to transfer this information to election officials.
Successful models are cropping up across the country. Arizona, for example, has an online system that's generated substantial savings. Officials there say that each online registration costs just three cents to process; paper forms costs 83 cents each to process. The system has also saved Arizona election officials tens of thousands of hours in time that would have been spent manually entering data.
And citizens report substantial satisfaction with the added convenience that online registration offers. It is no surprise that eight other states -- California, Colorado, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Oregon, Utah and Washington -- recently authorized online registration, or that similar bills are pending in at least four other states.
In Ohio, the resources and political will are in place. Passing a version of the election-enhancement bill that incorporates voter-registration modernization reforms could make the Buckeye State a model of electoral reform.
Tags: Voting Rights & Elections, Election Day Issues, Election Day Registration, No Match, No Vote, Voter ID
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