Mar 12 2010
Citizenship Checks Denied
Yesterday, I pointed out that part of the agenda of the Committee to Modernize Registration was to automatically add people to the voter registration rolls, regardless of whether their citizenship could be demonstrated. These voters would then remain on the rolls forever. The only way of preventing them from voting would be to have them sign something on election day. As I noted, I have emailed and written the Committee to ask for an analysis of all the states and whether citizenship status is tracked at their motor vehicle facilities. I still haven’t received a response.
In this modern age, the Committee to Modernize apparently isn’t too interested in using technology to verify citizenship, instead choosing to have these noncitizens deselect themselves from the process by not showing up to vote.
The Committee certainly has supporters at the United States Department of Justice. The DOJ has been in an ongoing battle with the State of Georgia. Georgia is attempting to use the Georgia driver’s database as well as the Social Security database to verify citizenship. DOJ says that because of its disproportionate impact on minorities, the Georgia plan is illegal.
We have actual evidence of the Department of Justice stepping in and denying the State of Georgia a very reasonable modernization of their own system. I wonder if those advocates of modernization will come to the defense of the State of Georgia and whether they’ll modify their own proposal to add a citizenship check?
The Georgia case is now going to the court system. How they fare will certainly be of interest to anyone who is looking for accuracy and integrity in our voter rolls.
It also begs the question as to what other states are doing to take advantage of databases that track citizenship. What we know is that the advocates of “modernization” have little interest in this aspect of modernization.
Here are a variety of the documents laying out the Georgia citizenship verification battle.
October 14, 2008 Georgia SOS Letter
December 10, 2008 Georgia SOS Letter
February 2, 2009 Georgia SOS Letter
Mark, the state of NC used to require that voters reg application match both the SS and DMV databases if both info provided. The problem is that the databases are not infallible.
The social security database is the most unreliable database to attempt a match.
In North Carolina, in 2006, the validation against the Social Security database failed 20.61% of the time. A validation against the Dept of Motor Vehicles database failed only 1.75% of the time.
Matches can fail because of clerical errors, identical 4 digits of SS numbers between multiple
people, applicants providing driver license numbers from a previous state because they don’t yet
have a new driver license, or an elections clerk may make an honest mistake in data entry for
example. None of these mistakes mean that the applicant is ineligible to vote, but any of them
may keep eligible citizens from the polls because of North Carolina’s practices.
HAVA did not intend for the voter registration database to be a barrier to voter registration, but to
serve as a tool. It is meant to allow states to waive ID requirements for first time voters who
register to vote by mail. In fact, if the applicant does not have either a driver’s license or a social
security number, then HAVA says that applicant shall be given a unique identifier . HAVA
never requires a positive match as a precondition for an acceptable registration.
With matching as requirement, voters who should be eligible are blocked from registering to vote.
North Carolina ended this practice in 2007 and instead if a voter doesn’t match, officials attempt to nofity them to clear up the matter beforehand or bring id to the polls when they vote, which will clear up the matter then. This way the eligible voter gets a real ballot and isn’t disenfranchised because of name change or typo.
The Social Security dept does not provide any reason for the failure to match, and remember we are submitting the voters name and only the last 4 digits of their social security number.
While I agree that we don’t want to automatically register non citizens, I do not believe that we can trust these different databases to interact smoothly and not disenfranchise a great many legitimate voters.
The databases should be an administrative tool, but not a barrier to voting.
To better understand this, read my report to the NC Legislature which led to a change in NC law
http://www.ncvoter.net/downloads/No_Match_No_Register.pdf
Joyce, like you I’ve seen in this office issues with statewide matching. Plenty of ways for problems to come up. Plenty of different reasons that the problems exist.
At the same time, it appears from the numbers compiled from the Georgia SOS and part of their December 10 letter that the number of unmatched voters on the citizenship question is extremely small. Each of these voters was still given the opportunity to vote provisionally and many did and provided proof of citizenship. Presumably, over time, the process will improve.
I haven’t worked out in my own mind just what is the unacceptable level of error that would justify canceling a program of citizenship checks. A large part of the determination is the commitment of the state or local jurisdiction to resolve these issues where questions arise.
For advocates of automatic registration from government databases, this issue cuts both ways. If you don’t believe the databases are accurate, then how can you use them for automatic registration? If you do believe in them, why can’t they be used for fraud detection.