Reed releases report on state voter database

Published 9:00 pm Wednesday, February 1, 2006

OLYMPIA – Secretary of State Sam Reed released the first complete report from the state’s new $6 million voter registration database on Wednesday, which showed more than 8,000 dead and duplicate registered voters have been removed from the voter rolls.

But more than 37,000 registrations are still being investigated, including 108 voters who voted in the November general election but are now listed as deceased.

Reed noted that the number should not be taken as 108 illegal votes; a person could have voted in the election and died the next day, or they could have voted absentee before the election and died after they sent in their ballot.

“What we don’t know is whether they were alive when they voted,” he said. “I’m assuming most of them were. That’s what’s being investigated right now.”

The compact disk released Wednesday contains all the state’s nearly 3.8 million voters, including more than 400,000 inactive voters. It is the first consolidated list of registered voters from the state’s 39 counties.

A database search showed there were 32,383 potential duplicate matches and 5,156 matches for deceased voters.

County elections workers are comparing signatures, names, birth dates and recently cast ballots to determine whether duplicated registrations belong to the same or different people, officials said.

“This is simply a snapshot,” Reed said. “This is changing every day. People register every day, move every day, die every day.”

More than 1,400 deceased voters were removed from Snohomish County’s rolls after they were flagged by state election officials.

Among those, 34 cast ballots in the November election, according to a computer analysis of voting records by The Herald. The majority of those voters died after the election, according to public records and obituaries.

However, voting activity was reported for two women whose names match people who have been dead for years.

Reed, who said investigators had not found any evidence of illegal votes, noted that most of the questioned registrations were inactive, meaning that the individuals hadn’t voted recently. Many of the duplicates likely represent people who failed to cancel their registration in one county when they moved to another, he said.

Reed said the reason the number of deceased on the list was so high was because this was the first time election officials had been able to use the Social Security Master Death Index to track voters who died in other states or out of the country.

“There are a number of people who live in the Vancouver area and die in a Portland hospital,” he said. “In the past, since we were relying simply on our own death records in our state, we were missing these people.”

The new system brings the state into compliance with the 2002 Help America Vote Act, which required better voting systems, improved voter access and statewide voter registration lists.

The federal legislation, passed by Congress two years after the controversial 2000 election, exposed numerous problems with voting systems across the country.

The database immediately shows if someone is registered to vote elsewhere in Washington.