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Voter Registration
By Jennifer S. Rosenberg – 10/03/08
If you live in a Radford University dorm room and wish to register to vote in Virginia this election, be prepared to argue with your local registrar.
One local election official in Virginia is automatically denying all registration applications from students who list a dorm address as their residence. At least one student's application was initially denied on this basis, and only approved after she went to the registrar's office and complained in person. [For the story, click here.] This registrar insists he's always rejected dorm addresses and will keep doing so, because he doesn't consider them sufficiently "permanent," as that term is used in Viriginia's election law. However, such a restrictive interpretation of the law violates a Supreme Court ruling that says students must be held to the same neutral residence standards as other voters. More shocking, the registrar's practice also violates explicit guidelines posted on Virginia's own Board of Elections website, which state: "A dorm or college addresss can be an acceptable residential address and does not disqualify you from voting." It can't get much clearer than that.
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Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Voter Registration
By Wendy R. Weiser – 10/02/08
Update (4:30pm): Ohio Supreme Court unanimously rules to require election officials to accept the absentee ballot requests.
Ohio's Secretary of State recently announced that election officials should reject absentee ballot requests sent by thousands of registered voters whose eligibility is not seriously in doubt. The rejected voters used an absentee ballot request form created by the McCain campaign but did not check an unnecessary box on the form. The box in question, which looks like a bullet point, appears next to the following bold-face statement on the top of the form: "I am a qualified elector and would like to receive an Absentee Ballot for the November 4, 2008 General Election." Most readers would interpret this as meaning that filling out the form and signing the card constitutes an affirmation that the applicant is a "qualified elector" who "would like to receive an Absentee Ballot." And indeed, that's how thousands of Ohio voters, many elderly, interpreted the form. But not the Secretary of State.
Ohio law makes clear that absentee ballot applications "need not be in any particular form." But according to a memo the Secretary of State issued on September 5, if a voter did not check the box in question, then the voter did not affirm that she is a qualified elector and her request must be rejected. Never mind the fact that the voters who filled out the ballot request card clearly intended to indicate that they are qualified. And never mind the fact that election officials can look up each applicant on the state's database of all qualified voters who are registered in Ohio. According to the Secretary of State's memo, the question of the voters' qualifications to receive a ballot turns on whether they interpreted a form the same way she does.
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Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Voter Registration, Voting Technology
By Wendy R. Weiser – 09/24/08
Updated (5:30pm): Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) writes to Social Security Administration seeking delay of shutdown. A copy of the letter is here. And a letter from EAC Commissioner Rosemary Rodriguez sent on the 19 can be found here.
A recent alert by the Social Security Administration announces that the agency plans to shut down its databases for maintenance from October 11 through October 13. While this might not sound like an election issue, it turns out that this could significantly impede registration of first-time voters as well as the re-registration of eligible citizens.
Here's why. A 2002 federal law, the Help America Vote Act, requires all states to "coordinate" their voter registration databases with the Social Security database (and state motor vehicle databases) for the purpose of processing new voter registration forms. For the millions of voters who do not have current driver's licenses and register using the last four digits of their Social Security numbers, state election officials are required to try to match their voter registration information against Social Security records. But if the Social Security database is down—as it will be for four days—they won't be able to do that. Across the country, the processing of these voter registration forms will grind to a halt for four days.
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Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Voter Lists and Databases, Voter Registration, Voting Technology
By Adam Skaggs – 09/19/08
Over the summer, we urged Congress to enact legislation that would reverse a Department of Veterans
Affairs (VA) policy that banned voter registration activities in VA
facilities. The unjustifiable policy
erected unnecessary hurdles that made it difficult for veterans to register and
vote—so it was no surprise that veterans
groups and voting rights
organizations actively fought the policy.
The VA stubbornly refused to
budge, though, leading lawmakers in Congress to proposed a statutory fix to the
VA's bureaucratic blunder: the Veterans Voting
Support Act. Along with many others,
we called
for prompt passage of the law in the House and Senate.
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Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Voter Registration
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, Voter Lists and Databases, Voter Purges and Challenges, Voter Registration
By Adam Skaggs – 08/29/08
In 1966, the United States Supreme Court ruled
it was unconstitutional to require voters to pay a $1.50 poll tax to
vote. In 2008, Americans living overseas—including members of the armed forces in Iraq
and Afghanistan—may have to fork over as much as $23.50 if they want to be sure their votes
count in November.
That's how much FedEx will
be charging
some overseas Americans to guarantee their absentee ballots will be delivered
in time to be counted. But while $23.50
might seem like a steep price to pay for casting a ballot, the FedEx service—a joint initiative with the Overseas
Vote Foundation—is actually a step in the right direction. The initiative offers steep discounts on FedEx's
normal rates, and means that Americans living abroad have at least one way to
guarantee their ballots make it back home in time to be counted. That's more than they've had in the past.
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Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Election Day Issues, Voter Registration
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, Voter Lists and Databases, Voter Registration
By Wendy R. Weiser – 08/25/08
*Cross-posted from The Hill
Yesterday the League of Women Voters of Florida, the Florida AFL-CIO, and other non-partisan voter registration groups announced their intent to continue signing up eligible Florida voters for the fall election despite the state’s law restricting voter registration drives. For groups that registered over half a million citizens in Florida in the last presidential race, this is big news.
Just earlier this year, the League and others had declared a moratorium on registering voters as soon as Florida’s new voter registration law went into effect because the law’s strict deadlines, backed by excessive fines, made the risk of conducting drives too prohibitive. States like New Mexico and Texas similarly impose onerous restrictions on voter registration drives, and there too, the laws have shut down or dramatically curtailed voter registration activity.
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Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Voter Registration
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