• Brennan Center »
• Democracy »
• Voting Rights & Elections »
• No Match, No Vote

No Match, No Vote

Under the federal Help America Vote Act, states must attempt to match the information new voters submit on their registration applications with data maintained in motor vehicle and Social Security databases. Federal law requires certain voters whose information is not successfully matched to present identification documents when they vote for the first time, and exempts voters whose information is successfully matched from those identification requirements. 

A handful of outlier states, however, have turned this data-matching exercise into a new prerequisite for voter registration. These states prevent voters who aren’t successfully matched from registering and voting even if they comply with federal identification requirements, unless the voters are able to clear a series of extra bureaucratic hurdles dependent on an error-prone “matching” process.

Voter eligibility must not be tied to successful data “matches” because the process routinely fails for reasons that have nothing to do with qualifications for voting:

• A citizen registering as "Bill" might not match if his Social Security number is issued under "William."
• A woman's married name might not match against a database where she is listed under her maiden name.
• Haitian-American and other Latino citizens who use compound names like "Jean-Robert Martin" or "Gabriel García Márquez" may find themselves with part of their first or last name listed as a middle name and unable to be matched.

These errors – as well as simple typos made when government clerks enter data from voters’ applications into the voter registration database – occur all the time, and prevent successful matches up to 30 percent of the time – even when voters are represented in the database in which a match is sought.

Since 2006, the Brennan Center has tracked states that have implemented “no match, no vote” policies and challenged these unnecessary and restrictive policies through advocacy and litigation. The Brennan Center brought a lawsuit that invalidated “no match, no vote” in Washington, and our ongoing litigation in Florida has resulted in significant policy changes that have lessened the burdens imposed on Florida voters.