Last week, New Mexico Secretary of State Diana Duran released a November 16, 2011 “interim progress report” summarizing previous findings by her office raising issues with New Mexico’s voter registration database. Like her earlier testimony last March, in which she refused to release the underlying data for her claims, this interim report by Secretary Duran is vague on details and methodology, and it lacks citations. As a result, confirming or investigating the claims and conclusions of the report is nearly impossible. But based upon the findings of the interim report, problems with New Mexico’s voter registration systems appear to be a result of how the Secretary of State manages the voter registration lists and identifies errors. The report doesn’t demonstrate any clear evidence of intent to commit fraud.
In March 2011, Duran appeared at a hearing on “no-photo, no-vote” voter ID legislation claiming, among other things, that her office matched 117 voter registrations to people who had used foreign-national credentials to obtain driver’s licenses. In the newly-released interim report, Secretary Duran focused on the 117 people that her office found on both lists. The report identifies 85 individuals without any voting history and 13 individuals that lacked sufficient identifying information for her office to determine whether they were the same person that appeared on both lists. That leaves 19 people with the same name who appeared on both lists and who voted at some point following their registration.
Of the 19 voters who appeared on both the voter registration list and the foreign-national credentialed driver’s license list, Secretary Duran’s office identified nine people who voted prior to applying for a driver’s license using foreign national documentation. Secretary Duran does not, however, provide information on how she matched those nine persons between the lists. Given a large enough pool, a matching name and birthdate are not enough to ensure that it is the same person on both lists – at least not without using unique identifying numbers on both lists, which she did not do. Moreover, even an address check cannot avoid problems with duplication of name, missing suffixes or prefixes, or even errors in the pollbooks. For the remaining 10 voters who Secretary Duran identified as registered to vote and who voted sometime after obtaining a driver’s license with foreign-national credentials, it is important to note that in the initial review of the voter file, Secretary Duran compared voting records between 2003 and 2010. During that same period 13,205 New Mexico residents became U.S. citizens.The potential for overlap here is not accounted for in her allegations.
From the analysis the Secretary of State has presented, there have been a number of problems at the different levels of administration that handle voter registration forms. One of the complaints from the Secretary is the use of “dummy” social security numbers, as their system will not accept an application without a social security number and so some officials used other numbers and added zeros to override that feature. Correcting this problem would be a clear first step towards preventing further confusion in the state’s voting rolls. The Secretary blames provisions of the NVRA for encouraging non-citizens to register to vote by offering them a registration form at the DMV and when applying for public benefits. Both requirements have proven to be highly successful measures that have increased access to voter registration among eligible American citizens. If New Mexico can devise and follow more effective protocols for registering new voters, then people registering who are not eligible will not be an issue.
There are many ways that the processing of voter registrations can be improved, including modernizing voter registration to limit clerical and data errors that are common and allowing more shared information between state and election offices. By allowing less opportunity for administrative error, making voter registration rules and procedures clearer, implementing safeguards, and properly adding voters to the voter file, the types of problems identified by Secretary Duran’s interim report will be minimized. Secretary Duran has self-identified a number of areas where her office can help tighten up procedures, make forms and signage more clear for citizens and non-citizens alike, and eliminate problems with list maintenance. The practice of holding up unrelated allegations of voter fraud, vilifying non-citizens, and creating unnecessary work for law enforcement is not responsible policy-making – it’s rabble-rousing and it’s bad governance.
Secretary Duran has clearly identified multiple areas where her office can implement new policies, procedures and practices that would vastly improve the administration of New Mexico’s elections without imposing any new, unnecessary burdens on voters.
We reported last week that Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler sued Denver County Clerk and Recorder Debra Johnson. He wanted an order from the court telling her she could not send mail ballots for the upcoming mail-only election to certain registered and eligible voters; namely, those voters who missed the last election. On Friday, a Colorado court denied Secretary Gessler’s request, thus allowing Denver to send mail ballots to all registered Denver voters without interference from the Secretary of State’s office.
Now, more counties are following Denver’s lead. Apparently, emboldened by the court’s decision, counties across Colorado are doing the right thing: making sure all registered voters can participate in the election.
Boulder, Pitkin, and Pueblo Counties will now join Denver in sending ballots to what are sometimes referred to as “inactive—failed to vote” electors. In plain language, this means those voters who are duly registered but did not vote in the last election. Mesa County will send ballots to inactive military and overseas voters. Pueblo County had already planned to send mail ballots to inactive voters, but was waiting for the outcome of the Denver suit. Now, Pueblo County will go ahead with its plans. Boulder, Mesa, and Pitkin Counties announced their decisions after Friday’s ruling. These moves will allow thousands of registered voters, who could otherwise have been prevented from voting, to participate in the election.
Unfortunately, Secretary Gessler has indicated that he will continue to press for restrictive voting rules for the 2012 Election. But for now, at least, the right to vote is on the rise in Colorado.
Yesterday, at a ceremony presided over by Chief Justice John
Roberts, the U.S. Postal Service issued
a series of new stamps
honoring the most influential Supreme Court Justices, among them Justice William J.
Brennan, Jr. The stamp commemorating
Justice Brennan is a welcome and well-deserved tribute; it's impossible to name
any judges who cared about our democracy more than Justice Brennan did.
The new Justice Brennan stamp is a tremendous honor. There's another move the postal service could
make, though, which would have a significant effect on the American democracy
so dear to Justice Brennan's heart - and all it would take is a simple,
clerical change to one of the postal service's most frequently used forms. By
making a small tweak to its national change
of address form, the postal service could make American elections function
more efficiently and eliminate problems for millions of Americans on Election
Day. This easy step would be a
meaningful tribute to Justice Brennan, whose judicial decisions uniformly
sought to protect the fundamental right to vote, including his opinion in the
landmark case Baker v. Carr, which opened the door
for courts to protect the "one-person, one-vote" principle.
One of the biggest challenges facing election administrators
is the need to ensure that voters' registration records contain up-to-date,
accurate information, including address information. Doing so isn't easy because tens of millions
of Americans - as many as one in six - move
every year. In any five-year period,
approximately 45 percent of the U.S.
population moves. All this moving poses
big challenges for election administrators - and voters.
Under the current system of voter registration, voters who
move must re-register every time their address changes by sending election
officials an old fashioned, paper form.
Every time there's an election, a flood of these forms are submitted
just before the registration deadline.
This consumes a big percentage of election administrators' resources:
address updates account for about a third of all voter registration
transactions and, unsurprisingly, election officials report that dealing with
address changes is the most challenging aspect of voter list maintenance. Processing so many forms results in errors
with voters' registrations, as temporary clerks enter data hand-written on
paper forms into states' registration lists.
These problems could be reduced significantly if election
officials had a tool to update voters' addresses in their registration records
on a rolling basis, not right before Election Day when the paper forms flood
in. The postal service's change of
address form could be this tool - if postal officials just added a single question. All they need to do is ask people if the
address changes they submit to the post office are just temporary changes for
mail forwarding, or should be used to update their permanent voting addresses. The postal service already collects
information on address changes. It
wouldn't be difficult to ask one more question about voting residence and share
the information voters submit with election officials.
A simple checkbox would do the job: "Check this box if you do not want to change the address where you are registered
to vote. Unless you check this box, your
address change will be reported to your state's election agency."
Because the change of address form doesn't currently ask
about voting address, election officials are often reluctant to rely on postal
data to update voters' records. This
makes sense, since there are plenty of reasons voters might want to have their
mail forwarded without changing their permanent voting address - like when a
member of the armed
forces is assigned to a new location but intends to eventually return to
his or her permanent voting address.
Letting voters specify changes to their voting address would let
election administrators know when voters had - and hadn't - moved their voting
residence. This way, the voters' records
could be updated ahead of Election Day, eliminating the eleventh hour scramble
to correct old registration information at the last minute.
Some states already use postal data to update the addresses
of voters who move. Minnesota, for example, revised its election code
in 2008, and now uses postal data to update the addresses of voters who move
either within or outside the state.
Similarly, Oregon conducts regular,
bi-annual cross-checks of postal change of address data to update address
information for voters who have moved - a particularly important task in Oregon, which votes
entirely by mail. But given the current
change of address form, states like Minnesota
and Oregon
must do follow-up investigations to determine which mailing address changes
should also serve as voting address updates, a task that adds expense and
delays, and introduces opportunities for errors. Adding the check-box would address these
concerns.
The postal service should also
provide election officials with change of address data free of charge - or at
least at cost. Laws in more than half
the states currently authorize election officials to update address information
based on postal data. But some officials
don't do so because of the cost of obtaining the data. Requiring that the postal service furnish
election officials with address data at little or no cost will reduce the costs
of updating voter data and produce more accurate voter rolls.
Since the historic 2008
election, a chorus
of voices has been calling for reforms of the voter registration system
that will bring
that system into the twenty-first century.
A simple change by the postal service could significantly aid in this
process, improving our voter registration system and ensuring accurate voter
rolls. It would be a welcome
contribution to a modern voter registration system in which accurate data from
various government sources is provided to election officials, improving
administrative efficiency and eliminating Election Day problems that stem from
registration errors.
Making this change would go a
long way to ensuring that citizens' votes' don't go uncounted because of out of
date registrations or clerical errors in their registration records. That would be a fitting tribute to Justice
Brennan, and all those who share his vision of a fully enfranchised society.
Consensus among Texan legislators
on election issues is becoming - stated generously - vanishingly
rare. In 2007, a firestorm over voter ID proposals grew so acrimonious
that a State Senator rallied to block proposed legislation, despite
the fact that he was recovering
from a liver transplant
and needed a hospital bed to be kept about 100 feet from the Senate
floor. Two years later, sparring over a new proposal drove marathon
hearings running for 23
hours straight.
This general climate makes H.B. 1457 nothing short of a wonder. It
passed the State House 144-1. It passed the State Senate 31-0. Bipartisan, near-unanimous
support - until it was shot
down last week
by Governor "Rick" Perry's veto. Its demise is a shame, for
Texans of all stripes.
The bill was a common-sense
attempt to address administrative flaws that cost Texan election officials
time, Texan taxpayers money, and Texan citizens the right to vote.
The federal Help America Vote Act asks each state to try to match the information on new voter registration
forms to data in the motor vehicles or Social Security systems.
Under the federal law, when the system can't find a match, voters
who mailed in their forms are flagged, and have
to show ID before
they vote. Texas
went a bit farther,
requiring every new voter with a failed match (whether registering by
mail or not) to show ID, after required correspondence back and forth.
The biggest problem with the
system is that the matching system isn't very sophisticated, and simple mistakes
or inconsistenciescause the match
to fail.
A lot. When a data entry temp hits the wrong key, the match can
fail. When a voter has a compound name, like "Mary Ann Smith"
or "Linus van Pelt," the match can fail. When a voter uses
a nickname, like "Bill," or a middle name, like "F. Scott,"
the match can fail. The
motor vehicles match does better than
the Social Security version,
and some clerks catch mistakes more often than others. Still,
the matching problems add up. In 2008, the match failed, nationwide,
about 30%
of the time.
Most of these common matching
errors have nothing whatsoever to do with the eligibility of the person
trying to register. But the errors do take time to resolve, and
cause hassles for both county clerks and voters. So Rep. Scott Hochberg, an engineer who understands both
the capacity and the limits of technology, tried to reduce the impact
of the mistakes. His
bill asked the
Secretary of State to come up with reasonable standards for deciding
when the name submitted by a local registrar was actually the same person
on motor vehicle records, and for sending mismatched information back
to registrars to help them resolve discrepancies. It also asked
the registrar to give rejected applicants as much information as possible,
to help them resolve problems. Simple, common-sense stuff
- which explains why 99.4% of legislators agreed.
Gov. Perry, unfortunately,
thought differently. His primary excuse for the veto was that a slight mismatch
"is a strong indication that the application was filled out by someone
other than the rightful voter."
"Rick," of all people,
should know better.
Never mind logic, which points
in exactly the other direction. Attempted fraudsters - many of whom
copy phone book records in
order to get paid
for registration canvassing they don't actually do - have no idea
what a particular voter's driver's license number is, and don't
come close when they scribble something random down. Slight and
readily identifiable mistakes in a name or birthday, on the other hand,
are a "strong indication" that someone hit the wrong key when typing.
Like when Gov. Perry discussed "indentifying" information in his veto message.
The logical assumption is that Gov. Perry's clerical assistant screwed
up - not that some fraudster faked the veto.
And never mind facts, which
point in exactly the other direction. In two federalcases now, the overwhelming evidence has
been that, as one election official recognized, "Most times the [voter's
registration] record is unable to be verified because of a data entry
error at the time of input (i.e., misspelled names and number transpositions)."
No, Gov. Perry should have
recognized that mismatches don't usually indicate fraud, because his
own registration application would likely have been mismatched.
See, "Rick" Perry is actually "James
Richard" Perry.
And though I don't know what name Gov. Perry uses on his driver's
license, his Social Security Administration records almost certainly
reflect the name he was first given.
175 of 176 Texas legislators
thought that their Secretary of State should be able to issue common-sense
rules to decide when it's sufficiently clear that Rick Perry is actually
James Richard Perry. It is a real shame for Texans that James
Richard disagreed.
Yesterday, Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner released to Governor Ted Strickland and the Ohio General Assembly a "blueprint for enhancing Ohio's elections." This blueprint (click here to download) is the culmination of work that began immediately after the 2008 election, when Secretary Brunner convened the first Ohio Elections Summit, which I chaired. The bipartisan Ohio Association of Election Officials has expressed support for Secretary Brunner's proposal, and I'm hopeful that it will move the ball closer toward important improvements in Ohio election administration and law.
The December Elections Summit called by Secretary Brunner, in addition to a later conference in March, brought together voters, non-partisan and partisan election experts, election officials and state legislators, of both political parties. These events were deliberative and substantive. As I've blogged before, I would very much like to see more Secretaries of State follow Jennifer Brunner's lead and adopt similar processes in their states.
In December, Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner called together some of the country's leading election experts and voting rights advocates, as well as a bipartisan group of state legislators and election officials, to review the 2008 election and offer suggestions for reforming the state's election policy. She asked me to Chair this summit and to prepare a report summarizing the views of those who participated, providing relevant background and data where needed. She called this the "first step" in a process to solicit the views of Ohio voters and experts as she developed her reform agenda.
As the 2008 Election draws to a close, the stars are coming out to protetct voting rights. Last Friday, along with the Advancement Project, the Brennan Center produced several PSAs featuring Sean "P. Diddy" Combs and Russell Simmons. I've posted them below. Here's some of the release announcing the campaign
Sean "P. Diddy" Combs and Russell Simmons have teamed up with the Advancement Project and the Brennan Center for Justice on a voter education campaign in the key states of Florida, Virginia, Ohio and Colorado. The campaign kicked-off Saturday, with the release of Public Service Announcements, released to radio, which gave voters important information to bring ID and to contact 1-866-OUR-VOTE with any problems.
When voters show up at the polls and have their eligibility questioned, they may be asked to vote with "provisional ballots." Known as a fail-safe for voters who are being challenged or who are not on the rolls, provisional ballots should be treated skeptically.
Rules vary from state to state, but these ballots are often counted only if the voter appears in a voter registration database or if the voter can provide evidence of his eligibility in the days after the election. For this reason, many provisional ballots go uncounted. In the 2008 primaries, 40% of provisional ballots were ultimately rejected.
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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