The State of Illinois is one of five states to receive an Election Assistance Commission grant of $2 million to enhance their efforts to collect data regarding voter registration and voting.  Champaign County will be receiving some funds to modify our voter registration system to enable us to better supply the data the Election Assistance Commission wants.

This project is in part a result of Heather Gerken’s work as outlined in The Democracy Index, a book I referenced in another blog post.  I have serious reservations about much of the book that I’ll lay out in future posts.  But on the issue of data collection, I think she and others are on the right track.  Gathering more information about the processes of government in order to determine if goals and standards are being met is a good idea.  Election administration is just one area that data collection has great value.

At the same time, I’m concerned that those behind the project operate without a full awareness of the challenges presented to election officials in meeting these data collection goals.  Further, if, as Gerken suggests, election officials are to be judged in part on how well they attain these goals, it is important for everyone to get on the same page.

Foremost among those, is to agree on definitions.  For example, one of the pieces of data requested by the EAC is for the number of invalid voter registration applications.  To someone who doesn’t work in a voter registration office, this might seem like an easy request.  But it actually needs to defined better for us to provide the data.  Our office routinely receives voter registrations from other counties.  A student may fill out an application to be registered in another county.  Deputy registrars now actually have the ability to register people from any county.  Occasionally, a state agency will forward an application to us for a voter in another county.  Our office “rejects” these applications, and then forwards them on to the proper county.  If we were to count these registrations as invalid, the number of invalid applications would increase and it would appear that there was a problem where none existed.

Similarly, there are problems with how the EAC defines “advocacy group” and how they define the ways in which voters are removed from the voter registration rolls.

Further, there are some issues with determining the provenance of registrations.  My office has never been given the list of state agencies that submit registrations to us.  Instead, we are merely given a transmittal form from the agency, often with the State Board of Elections as the return address, even though it came from the agency.  You can see an example here.

More complicated are the NVRA forms that are submitted to our office by various groups.  Ironically, in 2000 I was criticized for supposedly tracking the origin of the forms and delaying the process for those that came from organizations that I supposedly didn’t like.  While those allegations were successfully refuted, I, as well as other election officials, can expect some negative reaction from individuals and groups as we try ascertain whether they are an “advocacy group”.  What happens when an individual or group brings by registration forms and refuses to tell where they came from or who they are working for?

We are excited about participating in this project to get more data to the EAC to allow them and us to better examine our procedures.  But without consistent guidelines that don’t presently exist, the data to be collected is of questionable value in comparing various jurisdictions, either within the state or within the country.

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