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No Match, No Vote
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
By Adam Skaggs – 10/23/08
Over the past few weeks, there's been an increasing amount of press coverage focusing on the fear that voters could be disenfranchised this year because of typos and other trivial errors that prevent voter records from matching with other government records, like the motor vehicle or Social Security databases. From the editorial page of the New York Times to the Colbert Report, voter data matching is the story of the moment. And in the last 24 hours, there have been two significant developments that make it less likely disenfranchisement-by-typo will have a significant effect on Election Day.
In Wisconsin this morning, Judge Maryann Sumi dismissed all claims in a case brought against the state's elections agency by the Wisconsin Attorney General. We've written about this case before, and why it was troubling: if the court hadn't thrown out the Attorney General's case, it could have put between 53,000 and 200,000 Wisconsin Voters at risk of having to vote provisional ballots. And, historically, as few as 30%of provisional ballots cast in Wisconsin actually get counted.
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Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, No Match, No Vote, Other Voter List Issues
By Adam Skaggs – 10/07/08
The voter registration deadlines of most states have either just passed or will come in the next two weeks, and there has been an unprecedented surge in registrations across the country. For most observers, this is evidence of a renewed public interest in participating in our democracy. Others, unfortunately, see the prospect of higher voter turnout as a threat—and are working to keep voters from registering and voting.
The efforts to suppress voting range from challenging the eligibility of voters whose homes have been foreclosed to scaring college students out of registering where they go to school. And, as we've written previously, efforts are under way in a number of states to use trivial imperfections in paperwork to keep voters off the registration rolls or kick them off when they are successfully registered. One way citizens are blocked from casting ballots that count is through so-called "no match, no vote" policies.
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Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Allegations of Voter Fraud, No Match, No Vote, Other Voter List Issues, Purges, Voter Registration Drives
By Adam Skaggs – 09/19/08
Cross-posted from the Huffington Post.
Concerns about matching voter data with motor vehicle records were back in the news last week in New Jersey, Wisconsin and Florida — but for very different reasons. In one case, the matches were conducted in an attempt to add voters to the registration rolls; in the others, to take them off. But the experience in each state teaches the same lesson: matching data between the voter and driver databases is an inherently flawed process — and one that's far too unreliable to make a successful "match" a precondition to registering and voting.
In New Jersey, it was an attempt by Secretary of State Nina Wells to expand the voting rolls that gave rise to the latest kerfuffle. Wells was concerned that some citizens who'd applied for driver's licenses hadn't been given the opportunity to register to vote, as is required under the "Motor Voter Act." So she had the Division of Elections cross-check the voter registration database against motor vehicle records. The data comparison turned up 880,000 driver's license records that couldn't be matched up with voter registration records. Officials concluded that this meant there were 880,000 drivers who weren't registered to vote. So, to be helpful, they began sending all those drivers a voter registration form, along with a letter encouraging them to fill it out and register so they could vote in November.
Unfortunately, a lot of those drivers already were registered, and they weren't too happy to receive letters implying they were not. The confusion arose because minor discrepancies between their records in the voter and motor vehicle databases — like missing middle initials or inconsistent treatment of hyphenated last names— prevented officials from matching a driver's record in the motor vehicle database with the same person's voter record.
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Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, No Match, No Vote, Other Voter List Issues, Purges, Voter Registration Drives
By Adam Skaggs – 09/08/08
When Wisconsin considered preventing voters from casting regular ballots if the state didn't find a "complete match" of the voter's data in the motor vehicle or Social Security database and the voter didn't have acceptable proof of residence at the polls, we warned them it was a bad idea. As we explained, it's bad policy to make a complete "HAVA match" a precondition to voting a regular ballot, because matching voter data fails from 20-30% of the time.
We were right: the initial results from Wisconsin showed a match failure rate of 22%. That is, nearly 1 in 4 voters weren't successfully "matched" with other government data—not because they weren't eligible to vote, but because of typos, missed middle initials, and other minor problems.
Thankfully, Wisconsin heard the message and rejected the proposed matching rule.
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Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, No Match, No Vote, Other Voter List Issues
By Adam Skaggs – 08/26/08
Having already rejected a proposed rule that would needlessly disenfranchise eligible voters this November—joining forty-five states and the District of Columbia in the process—Wisconsin unfortunately appears to be reconsidering the policy.
Back in July, the state's Government Accountability Board ("GAB") considered an emergency rule that would have prevented voters from casting regular ballots if the state didn't find a "complete match" of the voter's information in the motor vehicle or Social Security database and the voter did not show up at the polls with acceptable proof of residence. The GAB rightly rejected the proposal in July, after concluding it had insufficient data about how well "matching" voter data worked, and how many voters would be affected.
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Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, No Match, No Vote, Other Voter List Issues, Voter Registration Drives
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