Oct 06 2009
Ignoring the Facts
Ken Blackwell has an oped in the Washington Times supporting the efforts to “modernize” our voter registration system.
I was struck by this line.
The Internal Revenue Service and state tax boards seem to know where to find us every year, yet the current voter registration system requires each of us to file a new registration form when we move or risk losing our vote.
Which was immediately contradicted by the results of this simple google search. How about this headline.
The Internal Revenue Service is looking for taxpayers who are missing more than 279,000 economic stimulus checks totaling about $163 million and more than 104,000 regular refund checks totaling about $103 million that were returned by the U.S. Postal Service due to mailing address errors.
The proponents of modernization want you to believe that some computer program is going to magically eliminate problems in voter registration. The exact opposite is true. There will be more disenfranchisement and more chaos because a computer program is going to override the actions of voters.
There is little data provided by these proponents to support their view. There is ample evidence of governments inability to handle the job that these proponents want to give them.
Thank you! Notice that on the Voter Registration Modernization Committee there are no database experts?
An example of problems with using govt databases to maintain voter registration databases is that the failure rate of matching against the social security database is often as high as 20%.
This is due to name changes, clerical errors and more.
North Carolina used to require that voters match the databases otherwise they would get a provisional ballot. We called this “No Match No Vote”. Then that ballot would NOT be approved and counted.
Effect: disenfranchisement.
The NC Coalition for Verified Voting worked with state lawmakers to eliminate the matching requirement and instead have voters provide ID the first time they came to the polls IF there was no match. Every effort would be made to reach the voter before election day in the instance that they didn’t match. Voters who didn’t match would be given a regular ballot if they could provide some sort of id as accepted in our state (DL, SS, utility bills etc).
I am for ways to improve registration, and other countries have done it, although I am not fond of the idea of a “national ID”.
We should not take Blackwells advice to make massive changes, but step carefully, get some election officials who are respected for their objectivity to raise the issue of combining election administration with databases + reality.
If our goal is to enfranchise voters, we need to be very careful.
Thanks again Mark on a great blog.
Blackwell’s article also includes this:
“In Arizona, which recently started registering voters online, the costs of registration fell from 83 cents for processing a paper voter registration form to 3 cents for processing an online application.”
This is an eye-opening statistic and it might be worthwhile to get this verified directly from the source. I believe I have seen this figure before as coming from Maricopa county in Arizona.
Note that the states that offer online registration restrict it to those who have a state drivers license or a state ID card.
Paul, you’ll also note that it’s an opt in system. Very simple, and no doubt about a person’s residency for purposes of registration.