Blog
Other Voter List Issues
By Thaddeus Kromelis – 07/29/08
We don't need more reasons to worry about foreclosure rates.
Digby, nonetheless, citing this AP/CBSnews.com
story, provides one: the high rate of foreclosures in Ohio and the affect election officials
believe it could have on their voting rolls.
(Digby cited the voting issue in the context of a 7/26 longer posting on Hans von
Spakovsky, "legal disenfranchisement" and "voter fraud.") There's concern that a
wave of voters, still registered to their former—foreclosed—address, will
show up to the polls on election day. This could lead to a number of
pre-election challenges or a whole lot of voters casting provisional ballots in
Ohio.
Read the rest of this story ...
Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Allegations of Voter Fraud, Election Day Issues, Other Voter List Issues, Purges, Voter Registration Drives
By Michael Waldman – 05/23/08
I just sat through a nail-biting, emotionally exhausting
two hour TV movie. The opening ten minutes were especially
nerve-wracking. The film begins with elderly Floridians squinting at
their butterfly ballots, then stabbing at the ballots, scary music playing,
over and over, voting by accident for Pat Buchanan. Think of the shower
scene in "Psycho" with your grandmother instead of Janet Leigh. Even more
exciting: would the panting, lurching advance man catch up with Al Gore before
he walked onstage to concede?
Maybe not everybody would find this as thrilling. But
Recount,which airs on HBO this Sunday, is one of the
better political movies I've ever seen. It "gets" the motives and methods
of political players better than anything in years. More relevant to the
work of the Brennan
Center, it brings to life
the ways our elections can go wrong, and the rickety and often corrupt
machinery by which we still cast and count votes.
(Full disclosure: I am an old colleague and friend of Ron
Klain, the protagonist; I see GOP lawyer Ben Ginsberg at the beach many summers;
and I go duck hunting with James Baker every year. Well, that part isn't
true. But like anyone involved in politics, back then I had a rooting interest
in the outcome of the recount.)
The narrative crackles and does a good job portraying the
legal machinations that led to the Supreme Court's 5–4 intervention to stop the
counting, thus making George W. Bush President. It's all here, from the
"Brooks Brothers riot" in which Republican congressional staffers shut down the
counting in Miami,
to the frenzied efforts to read and understand the Supreme Court opinion that
announced its reasoning only applied to this case. The acting is
terrific, and the dialogue is sharp and as profane as real life politics (and
HBO).
Read the rest of this story ...
Tags: Democracy, Voting After Criminal Conviction, Voting Rights & Elections, Allegations of Voter Fraud, Other Voter List Issues, Purges, Voting Technology
By Justin Levitt – 04/24/08
If you weren't reading carefully, then you might have missed an
important nugget in a voter fraud story buried in Tuesday's
presidential primary coverage. It was in a piece Connecticut's
Hartford Courant ran entitled
"Dead
Voters?" (Note the punctuation, more on that all-important question mark in a
moment.)
The report concerned a research project to track down dead
voters on the state voting rolls. The researchers first tried to match up
computer lists of dead people to computerized voting records, comparing names
and birthdates from one list to the other.
Most times, this would have been the end of the research—and you'd have seen screaming headlines about rampant voter fraud. So many
matches, so many illegal votes. We saw stories like this, trolling for dead
people or double voters by trying to match records from place to place, in 2000, in 2004, in 2005,
in 2006. And we'll probably see them
again this year.
These stories all share a common problem: trying to identify
individuals by computerized matching of names and birthdates isn't all that
reliable. Even if the underlying information is accurate—and the lists of who voted, or who
is dead, often have mistakes—the matching exercise itself may get the
answer wrong.
For example, people are often surprised to find out how many
different people have the same name and birthdate. With just 23 people in a
room, it's more likely than not that two will share the same birthday (month
and day). Throw in the year, and—as proven in a new article on the
statistics of double voting (disclosure:
I'm the co-author)—the number is about 180.
Which means that if you've got 180 "John Smith"s or "Manuel
Rodriguez"s, at least two of them will probably be namesakes with the same
birthdate. When you start comparing
millions of voters to millions of other people, you start picking up
doppelgängers everywhere. Finding a few name-and-birthdate matches in lists of
millions of people shows statistical probability at work, not fraud.
Which is why the researchers behind yesterday's Courant article should be commended for
their unusual follow-up. The extent to which their overall match numbers are
inflated by the birthdate problem, or other match errors, is not clear—as
they noted.
But they also recognized that the overall numbers represented the start of an
investigation, not the conclusion. With a list of 100 suspects, the researchers
apparently applied a substantial amount of shoe leather, tracking down the
actual facts behind the voters in question and beyond the match. And lo and
behold: "Although the investigation found no evidence of deliberate fraud, it
uncovered numerous errors in voting and registration records kept by local
registrars."
So, thanks to a little more effort than usual, we know the
answer to the headline's question. Dead voters? No. Responsible research? So it
would seem.
Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Allegations of Voter Fraud, Other Voter List Issues
By Maggie Barron – 03/10/08
The media was atwitter over the weekend
with possible solutions to the Florida/Michigan primary problem. Can the Democratic
Party disenfranchise all those voters merely to prove a point? Did the states
miscalculate so wildy that there's a real chance they won't be able to seat any
delegates in one of the most important conventions in years? And who is going
to pay for another round of elections? As someone who works on voting rights,
it's hard to argue that those Florida and Michigan voters (who had
nothing to do with scheduling their rogue primaries) should be shut out of the
process. But the kid in me, reared on playgrounds and games like handball and
freeze tag, knows you can't change the rules in the middle of the game.
One solution bandied about by the Florida
Democratic Party, according to the Los Angeles Times, is a vote-by-mail
election, which would cost significantly less than another traditional primary.
"Under this scenario," the article says, "ballots would be mailed out to all of
Florida's
approximately 4.7 million registered Democrats in May or June," costing between
$4-$6 million (much less than the estimated $25 million for another traditional
primary).
But trying to implement a vote-by-mail
scheme so quickly is not the solution to get the Florida Democratic Party out
of this mess. Vote-by-mail might seem easier, and it certainly is cheaper, but sending
ballots out to 4.7 million voters is complicated and subject to errors that
could easily compound Florida's
primary woes.
Consider California, where officials were still processing
and counting vote-by-mail ballots weeks after its primary. According to the New
York Times, about 4.1 million Californians voted by mail. The practice
can be easier for voters, but it is labor-intensive for registrars and staff,
who must open all the mail, authenticate it, and sort it by precinct. In California, voting
officials literally ironed thousands of ballots that had been crumpled or
creased in the mail, in order to feed them into the vote-counting machines (the
appropriate setting to iron out a ballot, just so you know, is apparently
"silk.") This is part of the reason why,
two weeks after Super Tuesday, California
still had some 800,000 ballots to count.
And that's only considering the
vote-by-mail ballots that actually reach
eligible voters. In California
on Super Tuesday, the Election Protection Hotline reported numerous calls from confused voters who had requested vote-by-mail ballots
but had never received them. Project
Vote reminds us that vote-by-mail can only be as dependable as the mail
service itself, which is inconsistent in low-income and densely populated urban
areas, areas with non-traditional addresses, and when people move. So for people who live in housing
developments or remote urban areas, and who get there mail less reliably than
others, this is not a great solution.
Linking your ability to vote with the post
office's ability to reach you is a dangerous proposition. Voter
caging, the practice of sending out mass mailings and using the returned
mail to challenge voters' registrations, is notoriously inaccurate, which is
why there are currently bills pending in Congress to ban the practice. Voter
registration lists can be rife with simple errors in addresses that can make
mail undeliverable, and mail
often goes undelivered even when the voter at the address may be registered
and perfectly eligible.
While vote-by-mail shows promise as a means
of conducting elections in the future, it can't be implemented as quickly as
many election officials want it to be. As voting technology expert Larry Norden
explained in testimony in Ohio (which has been considering a vote-by-mail plan
for the November elections), delivering high-volume mailings in a secure,
accessible way is no easy feat, and it should not be adopted without good
planning and public education, especially right before a critical election (and
certainly not for a slap-dash do-over election like we may have in Florida.)
The cost of a vote-by-mail election is even
more attractive to the Florida Democratic Party, since it is getting no love, or
money, from DNC chair Howard Dean or Governor Charlie Crist. But the truth
is there will be no easy, or cheap, solution here. Unfortunately it will be
voters who will in some way pay for the party's mistake.
Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Other Voter List Issues
By Myrna Pérez – 02/26/08
Hailing from Texas, I've seen my fellow southerners come up with some great ideas—like adding creamy gravy to chicken-fried steak, for instance. But now comes Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann with an election "reform" proposal that has me scratching my head. The Secretary of State's plan includes a lot of things, but the provision that should inspire bipartisan outrage is the section requiring all persons who registered prior October 1, 2008 to
reregister. The Secretary is concerned that the voter rolls are bloated and apparently thinks starting from scratch is the way to fix the problem. Talk about the medicine being worse than the disease.
We should strive for accurate rolls. On this, no one disagrees. When voter rolls are accurate, turn-out numbers are more precise, and election misconduct is easier to detect. Problems arise, however, when the quest for accurate rolls eclipses the voter's actual rights. When eligible voters are removed from the rolls, they're silenced unless they're able to correct the problem in time to qualify for the next election. Unfortunately, many voters will not know or understand they have to reregister before it is too late.
The irony is that there is no need for extreme proposals like Secretary Hosemann's. Federal law sets forth a common-sensical approach that strikes a balance between voters' rights and accurate voter rolls. Under the National Voter Registration Act, sometimes referred to as the "NVRA" or "Motor Voter Act," if it appears from information provided by the Postal Service that a registrant should no longer be on the rolls, the officials are supposed to send a forwardable notice asking for a confirmation of the registrant's address. If that registrant does not respond, the registrant remains on the rolls for two federal elections. If the registrant shows up to vote in the interim, she or he can update the necessary information. Only registrants who fail to respond to the address confirmation notice AND miss two federal elections can be removed from the voter rolls.
Under Hosemann's proposal, registrants who vote in any election conducted between November 3, 2008 and December 31, 2009 and meet certain other conditions will be deemed reregistered. Everyone else who registered prior to October 1, 2008 will have to reregister in order to be able to vote in any election after December 31, 2009. The Secretary's proposal will disenfranchise too many voters in the name of minimizing registration roll bloat. The NVRA method is simple and inexpensive. Secretary Hosemann should be ensuring compliance with the NVRA, not putting forth a new proposal that, by design, jeopardizes the voting rights of Mississippians.
Upate, 2/27
Thanks to an amendment offered by Senator David Blount, D-Jackson, the Mississippi Senate passed a revised version of the bill which did not include the provisions requiring all voters to reregister!
Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Election Day Issues, Other Voter List Issues, Purges, Voter Registration Drives
By Wendy R. Weiser – 02/04/08
You can't make this stuff up.
This weekend, the Indianapolis
Star reported
that the state of Indiana-which is currently defending its law denying the vote
to people without government-issued photo IDs before
the U.S. Supreme Court-is poised to revoke the IDs of up to 90,000 people. This ID purge is scheduled to happen later
this month, right in the middle of the primary season in an important
presidential election year, and only weeks before a special
congressional election.
This means that, in addition to the 13% of registered
voters in Indiana who don't have current state-issued photo IDs, up to
90,000 more could be blocked from voting because of Indiana's misguided voter
ID law, the most restrictive such law in the country. (Caveat:
the state is not physically collecting the cancelled IDs, and so it is
not clear what will happen when their holders show up to vote.)
And it's even worse than it sounds. The reason Indiana is planning to revoke these IDs is
because the state's Bureau of Motor Vehicles ran a computer check and was
unable to "match" the bearers' information against records kept by the Social
Security Administration. This kind of computer
matching is a singularly misguided and unreliable way to identify invalid ID
records. Typos, clerical errors, and
other irrelevant discrepancies in BMV and Social Security databases typically
cause a huge number of match failures between perfectly valid government records. A person listed as "Bill" on his driver's
license but "William" on his Social Security card will fail to match; so will a
woman whose driver's license is in her married name but whose Social Security
records are in her maiden name.
When other jurisdictions have tried record
matching in the voting context, there were match failures for up to 20-30%
of would-be voters. When they tried to
match records against the Social Security database, as Indiana has done here, the match failures
have risen to 46.2%. Erroneous match
failures are typically more common for people of color, as the Brennan Center
recently found when it analyzed Florida's
match files in connection with an ongoing lawsuit. Again, these match failures are not
indicative of any problems with the voters.
After initial efforts to investigate these mismatches in Indiana, a BMV
spokesperson admitted
that "[t]he great majority of mismatches that occurred were what we would call
innocent or inadvertent kinds of things."
The bottom line here is that Indiana has just made it doubly difficult
for its citizens to vote. Not only do they
have to go through the expense and effort to get government-issued photo IDs in
order to vote, but those who already have ID now need to navigate a bureaucratic
obstacle course to make sure that their IDs haven't been bumped. The ID purge may also circumvent the voter protections
Congress put in place in the Motor Voter law to protect against inaccurate
purges of the voter rolls.
It's almost as though officials in Indiana are trying to keep their citizens-or at least some of their
citizens-from being able to vote.
Let's hope that Indiana
rescinds its plans to cancel these IDs before its too late. But more importantly, this incident provides
yet another reason why it doesn't make sense to tie voting rights to
state-issued IDs, and yet another demonstration of the huge number of people
that could be unfairly barred from voting because of Indiana's voter ID law. Let's hope that the Supreme Court is watching
this current mess when it decides the constitutionality of Indiana's voter ID law.
Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Other Voter List Issues, Purges, Voter ID
By Michael Waldman – 07/10/07
*Cross-posted from The Huffington Post
As progressives prepare for the political season, we might rue the "one
that got away." There's a rare chance to reform voting laws to expand
the electorate and strengthen democracy, not just next year but for the
next decade. But election reform in 2008 must start in 2007 -- and time
is slipping by.
Voting is the heart of democracy. Yet millions of Americans face
huge obstacles when they try to register, cast their ballot, or have it
counted. We now know that last year partisans waged a frenetic effort
to disenfranchise voters -- orchestrated, remarkably, by the Justice
Department itself. Happily, a growing grassroots voter protection
movement pushed back. (The Brennan Center for Justice, to cite just one
example, stopped the disenfranchisement of some 300-700,000 voters,
with lawsuits and advocacy.) That was needed, and right, but ultimately
defensive.
Now we can go on the offense: to change voting laws and reform
election administration, in states across the country. Why the
opportunity? The new Congress, of course, but even more, twelve new
secretaries of state elected on voter protection platforms; sixteen
states with potentially sympathetic Democratic governors and
legislatures (up from eight); in some places, competition among both
parties to be "pro reform." Rarely do the stars align as now. Key
goals:
* Keeping eligible citizens on the voter list. State officials
routinely purge voters from the rolls -- a secret process prone to
partisan manipulation. A purge list of "potential felons" in Florida in
2004 included 22,000 African-Americans and only 63 Hispanics, in the
one state where those blocs vote for different parties. (What a
coincidence!) Now we can end the system of secret and partisan purges
of the voter rolls. Several Secretaries of State are preparing to
reform their own systems. And the Brennan Center plans lawsuits in
other states to force standards and accountability.
* Ending felony disenfranchisement, an ugly relic of Jim Crow.
Florida's new Republican governor, Charlie Crist, with a stroke of a
pen created the chance to restore the vote for about 500,000.
Virginia's laws disenfranchise for life one out of three black men. The
Democratic governor, Tim Kaine, could -- and should -- do what
Florida's conservative Republican governor did, and change the state
forever.
* Allowing Election Day Registration. States with EDR have 5-7%
higher voter turnout. That's an astounding jump, far higher than even
the best voter registration or GOTV drive could muster. Recently Iowa
and Montana joined six other states with EDR, and North Carolina is
poised to be the ninth. Drives are underway in a half dozen other
states.
* Fixing electronic voting. A Brennan Center task force of the
nation's top computer scientists concluded emphatically that every one
of the nation's electronic voting systems is insecure. Next week, the
U.S. House of Representatives votes on the bill introduced by Reps.
Rush Holt (D-NJ) and Tom Davis (R-VA), a strong measure that would ban
touchscreen machines that lack an audit record, require random
auditing, and prohibit wireless components in voting machines. Numerous
states can be pushed to require paper trails and audits.
* Stopping onerous ID requirements. An individual is more likely to
be killed by lightening than to commit voter fraud. The U.S. Attorney
scandal has revealed the "voter fraud" scare for the political witch
hunt that it is. But it has proven a highly convenient way for
partisans to push for proof of citizenship and other ID requirements
that are end up preventing voting, not fraud. (The necessary paperwork
can cost up to $200. By contrast, the notorious poll tax was $8.97 in
current dollars when it was declared unconstitutional in 1966.) For the
first time in years, civil rights proponents are able to push back --
which helps clear the field for pro-enfranchisement reform.
It all adds up to a rare opportunity for lasting change. But
progressives must be truly strategic. In 2004 they spent hundreds of
millions of dollars to register and mobilize voters. Activists plan
similar, even larger efforts next year. Voter mobilization is vital.
But this time there's a difference: a fraction of that significant
investment, sharply targeted, can help sweep away barriers to civic
participation. Soon it will be too late. Most state legislatures will
finish their work just a few months into next year, and the polarized
political season looms. For needed changes to have a chance to empower
voters in November 2008, the activism must start now.
Stakes are achingly high. Voting rights should be a nonpartisan
issue, but not everyone got the memo. In a moment of candor about just
one obstacle to voting, the former Political Director of the Texas
Republican Party told the Houston Chronicle "that requiring
photo IDs could cause enough of a dropoff in legitimate Democratic
voting to add 3 percent to the Republican vote." That's an affront not
to a party, but to democracy.
Tags: Democracy, Voting After Criminal Conviction, Voting Rights & Elections, Other Voter List Issues, Voter ID, Voter Registration Drives, Voting Technology
Page 3 of 3 pages < 1 2 3
We don't need more reasons to worry about foreclosure rates.
Digby, nonetheless, citing this AP/CBSnews.com
story, provides one: the high rate of foreclosures in Ohio and the affect election officials
believe it could have on their voting rolls.
(Digby cited the voting issue in the context of a 7/26 longer posting on Hans von
Spakovsky, "legal disenfranchisement" and "voter fraud.") There's concern that a
wave of voters, still registered to their former—foreclosed—address, will
show up to the polls on election day. This could lead to a number of
pre-election challenges or a whole lot of voters casting provisional ballots in
Ohio.
Permalink