New voter registration systems criticized
Published 9:00 pm Wednesday, March 8, 2006
An advocacy group has warned of flaws in the ways several states, including Washington, are implementing new voter registration systems, a problem it said could improperly keep millions of people off the voter rolls in this fall’s elections.
After the ballot controversies in Florida in the 2000 presidential election, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act. It required states to modernize election procedures, including by establishing central registration databases that would verify voter registration information by comparing it against data on file with state motor vehicle departments and the federal Social Security Administration.
This week, the New York-based Brennan Center for Justice released a first-of-its-kind survey saying that at least seven states – Washington, Texas, South Dakota, Iowa, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia- will automatically reject applications whenever the data don’t match, even if a person registered properly and is eligible to vote. This could potentially disenfranchise up to 20 percent of eligible voters in these states.
“Most states use the match process to clean up the voter rolls,” Brennan Center associate counsel Justin Levitt said. “A small minority use the match as a condition of registration. If you don’t match, you can’t register to vote.”
Matches might not occur, for example, when a man named “William” registers under the name “Bill” or when a woman registers for the first time with her married name or if there is a typographical error.
This issue is one of the latest in a litany of concerns about states’ ability to upgrade their elections equipment to comply with federal law. For example, the Department of Justice sued New York last week for failing to install a statewide registration database and failing to upgrade its voting machines so they could be used easily by disabled people.
