OLYMPIA – More than 800 felons who are still in prison or under state supervision have been removed from the state’s voting rolls, Secretary of State Sam Reed announced Thursday.
The purge of 848 people is the result of the first statewide screening for illegally registered felons since the new statewide voter database was launched in January. The total includes 68 from Snohomish County and 4 from Island County.
“People need to know we are going after this very aggressively,” Reed said. “We want them to know there’s integrity in the voter registration system.”
Snohomish County’s low total indicates election officials there are “been doing a very good job” of tracking people convicted of a felony and removing their names from voter rolls.
No one’s name is erased from county or state voter databases until they’ve been contacted by mail, Reed said.
Felons who completed their prison sentences and owe only court-ordered fines were not removed, pending a decision by the state Supreme Court on the state’s appeal of a King County judge’s March ruling that released felons can’t be kept from voting simply because of unpaid fines and fees.
“This is not complete victory by any means, but it’s a step in the right direction,” said Jonathan Bechtle, director of the conservative Evergreen Freedom Foundation’s Voter Integrity Project.
Bechtle said Reed also needs to focus on clearing noncitizens and federal felons from the system.
The statewide voter database contains all the state’s nearly 3.8 million voters – including more than 400,000 inactive voters. In May, Reed announced that about 55,000 registrations were scrubbed after investigators found duplicate entries and dead voters on the rolls. Since May, another 17,000 of those have been removed.
Reed said there has been no evidence of fraud in the duplicate, deceased or felon registrations.
He said the felon registrations, were likely cases of voters being registered in one county and convicted in another. Before the state database was in place, it was difficult to cross-check information.
Counties where felons were taken off the rolls:
Benton: 20
Chelan: 19
Clallam: 2
Clark: 33
Cowlitz: 60
Douglas: 15
Ferry: 1
Franklin: 9
Grant: 13
Grays Harbor: 6
Island: 4
Jefferson: 8
King: 280
Kitsap: 19
Kittitas: 2
Klickitat: 3
Lewis: 10
Mason: 3
Okanogan: 3
Pacific: 7
Pend Oreille: 4
Pierce: 119
Skagit: 17
Skamania: 2
Snohomish: 68
Spokane: 40
Stevens: 3
Thurston: 43
Walla Walla: 1
Whatcom: 6
Whitman: 9
Yakima: 19
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