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Cross-posted at Project Vote's blog, Voting Matters

Weekly Voting Rights News Update

By Erin Ferns

"I think the days of ballot box stuffing are more or less gone." - Allen Raymond, former GOP operative

Voter fraud by individuals has been a major partisan debate in recent elections, inspiring multiple states to consider or pass laws that purport to stop it, including "no-match, no-vote" list maintenance procedures and strict voter ID  requirements. Despite federal findings that the act of casting an illegal ballot is exceedingly rare, partisans often cite large scale voter registration drives as voter fraud culprits, and perpetuate the myth of voter fraud by spreading the fear that such votes cancel out legitimate ones. With rising registration rates - particularly among historically underrepresented Americans - it is no surprise that partisans are spreading this myth, and the media often perpetuates the hysteria by printing stories on the small numbers of bad registration cards submitted by large scale voter registration drives (including the 1.2 million submitted by Project Vote voter registration partner, ACORN).

Despite the constant trickle of "voter fraud" scares in the media, however, it is becoming more evident that elections are more often compromised by systematic efforts to suppress eligible voters, including the very measures that are meant to protect against the extremely rare instances of ineligible voters attempting to cast a ballot. The real enemy to fair elections are organized voter suppression efforts that are seen in these poorly devised election laws, partisan dirty tricks, and systematic partisan efforts to challenge legitimate voters. From the alleged plan to challenge foreclosure victims in Michigan and Ohio to the potential "no-match, no-vote" fiascoes in Wisconsin and Florida, many Americans have cause to wonder, "will my vote count in November?"

On Monday, September 22, KCRW's To the Point host, Warren Olney, discussed voter fraud and voter suppression in the 2008 presidential election with Project Vote Executive Director Michael Slater, Doug Chapin of the Pew Center, former GOP strategist Allen Raymond, and Wall Street Journal columnist, John Fund.

In "major states like Ohio, Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania" this year, Slater warned that we can expect some "election administration problems," which run the gamut from logistical issues, such as poorly distributed voting machines, to voter suppression tactics, including voter caging, which historically affect low income and minority communities. These communities, which have historically been systematically shut out of the electoral process, have shown signs of increased political interest and higher registration rates they year, prompting fears of increased partisan efforts to suppress this tidal wave of new voters.

Fund repeated stories of small numbers of allegedly invalid voter registration cards being submitted out of the more than 1.2 million turned in this year by Project Vote voter registration partner, ACORN, and said "some of these voter registration efforts have been questionable." But former GOP operative Allen Raymond, explained that there was a critical difference between a "systematic" voter suppression program "versus one that is part of the process." For one, he said, systematic efforts, like voter caging, are far more detrimental to election integrity than voter registration drive employees submitting bad applications.

Raymond was dismissive of the allegations against voter registration drives.

"Look, those are a couple of people who are just trying to earn a buck, collecting signatures. I've seen it all the time on ballot access petition efforts," he said of the voter registration fraud allegations. "I think the days of ballot box stuffing are more or less gone...and so I think what you really need to address are those systematic efforts," said Raymond.

Election Dirty Tricks

Raymond knows all about partisan use of systemic voter suppression efforts; he has written a book entitled How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative, which describes his years as a dirty-tricks specialist for the GOP. Raymond served time for a 2002 Republican phone jamming scheme. In a September 15 interview with the Michigan Messenger Raymond said "holding down Democratic turnout is a key part of Republican strategy for victory in November." Asked about reports of Republican attempts to challenge the voting rights of foreclosure victims, Raymond said that if he were still in the dirty-tricks business he "would be doing that all day long."

Other stories that have surfaced in recent weeks contribute to fears that partisans are ramping up their voter suppression machines. Last week, a mailer from the Republican National Committee that went to multiple registered Democrats in Florida left many confused about their party affiliation, according to Pam Fessler of NPR. While some Democratic officials consider the mailer an attempt to challenge voters based on returned mail, particularly Democratic senior citizens, Republican officials claim the confusion was not intentional and denied allegations of voter caging, according to the Naples Daily News on Sunday.

But in recent weeks several media and Internet outlets, including Air America, have reported on accounts of massive mailings of absentee ballots from the McCain campaign sent to registered Democrats and Obama supporters in other battleground states as well, including  Wisconsin, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey; many of the mailings appear to contain the wrong preprinted return addresses for ballots, which would direct them to the wrong precinct.

Of even greater concern than dirty tricks is the possibility of voter suppression through election administration problems that are expected to run the gamut in key states.

No-Match, No-Vote

Voter advocates claim thousands of Wisconsin voters may "lose their right to vote" as a result of a lawsuit filed by Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen just six weeks before the election.  Hollen, who sued the Government Accountability Board - which oversees elections in the state -  to "seek an order requiring the board to compare voter information to the Department of Transportation records for more voters," is being scrutinized for his ties to the McCain campaign (he is the campaign's co-chair in Wisconsin), according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

Hollen hopes to quickly implement a notoriously faulty voter list maintenance system known as "no-match, no-vote," which experts say could result in purging eligible voters from the Wisconsin registration rolls. This system was found to incorrectly fail 22 percent of voters during an initial test in August (additionally, four out of six judges on the G.A.B. also failed to match the system). Under "no-match, no-vote", voters could mistakenly lose their registration as a result of "transposed digits, variations in names ("Becky" instead of "Rebecca," for instance) or poor handwriting on voter registration forms," the Journal-Sentinel reports. "Apt to fail are people with apostrophes, hyphens or spaces in their names. Voter records usually drop punctuation and spaces - 'ONeil' instead of 'O'Neil' - while driver's license records often keep them."

A similar practice is being enforced in Florida that could "turn Election Day 2008 in Florida into a catastrophe akin to the hanging-chads debacle of 2000," Florida Today editorialized this week. "With no time for troubleshooting the system, that could falsely disenfranchise many who've done nothing wrong." The state's dormant  2005 "no-match, no-vote" law was revived by Republican Secretary of State Kurt Browning in early September after challenges failed in court. Browning's decision to enforce this practice caused a critical uproar from voting rights activists, who claim such a move could disenfranchise thousands of Floridians, according to a Miami Herald report earlier this month.

"No-match, no-vote laws" are sold to the public as a way to prevent fraudulent voting, but as Florida Today correctly notes; "few people try to vote under someone else's name. A five-year hunt for voter fraud by the Justice Department under the Bush administration found almost no evidence of organized efforts to tilt national elections."

The Elections Supervisor of Leon County, Florida, Ion Sancho, is quoted in the Florida Today piece as saying that the real problem is not potential fraud by voters but partisan manipulation of the process. Sancho has been vocal about his opposition to the Florida laws he is required to enforce, including how the state makes eligible voters vulnerable to partisan challenges. Speaking on WGCU radio in Florida on September 12, Sancho told host Sasha Rethati that in the past ten years the Florida legislature had written rules to "make sure that the party in power could stay in power." He pointed to a 2005 Florida law that stripped the state's voters of the right to contest challenges at the polls, and how challengers now only needed to express a "good faith belief" that a voter is ineligible to force the voter to file a provisional ballot. "You can supply a list containing 10,000 names to the supervisor of elections," said Sancho, "and I have to make all 10,000 members vote by provisional ballot."

"What we have here is partisans attempting to use anything they can possibly find to gain an advantage on the other party," said Sancho. "Quite frankly, I'm fed up with it as an election official. The reason I came into this field was to make sure Americans had the right to vote, and to have their votes counted properly."



Quick Links:

Minnite, Lorraine. The Politics of Voter Fraud. Project Vote. March 2007.



In Other News:

Same-day voter signup getting serious look - Decatur Herald-Review [Ill.]

...Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, is investigating moving to same-day voter registration in two years. That means a person who was eligible to register but had not done so could walk into a polling place on Election Day, register to vote and be handed a ballot...

GOP: Lose Your Home, Lose Your Vote - The Nation

Senator John McCain was a foot soldier in the deregulation revolution, which triggered the current banking crisis and the wave of foreclosures. In Michigan, his party wants to deny the right to vote to victims of the GOP's misguided economic policies and the sleazy banking practices they encouraged.

Oklahoma election officials disagree with ACLU - Associated Press

State law prohibits former felons from registering to vote until the full length of their prescribed sentence has expired - even if they are not in prison and are no longer supervised by the Department of Corrections, the secretary of the state Election Board said Monday.

Erin Ferns is a Research and Policy Analyst with Project Vote's Strategic Writing and Research Department (SWORD).

Cross-posted to Project Vote's blog Voting Matters.

By Nathan Henderson-James

Today Wired Magazine published an in-depth look at potential Election Day problems associated with voter registration data matching, list maintenance, provisional ballots, and shadowy interstate compacts through which member states cross-check their voter registration lists and purge supposedly duplicated voters. Titled "Voter Database Glitches Could Disenfranchise Thousands", the piece, written by Kim Zetter, starts this way,

Electronic voting machines have been the focus of much controversy the last few years. But another election technology has received little scrutiny yet could create numerous problems and disenfranchise thousands of voters in November, election experts say.

This year marks the first time that new, statewide, centralized voter-registration databases will be used in a federal election in a number of states.

The article presents an in-depth discussion of the potential problems associated with the creation of the centralized databases and their potential to disenfranchise thousands of newly and currently registered voters in state after state.  

But election experts say the real concern is how states are conducting database matches of new voters under HAVA.

The law requires each voter to have a unique identifier. Since 2004, new registration applicants have had to provide a driver's license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number to register (voters who don't have them are assigned a unique number by the state). States are required to try to authenticate the numbers with motor vehicle records and the Social Security Administration database.

But databases are prone to errors such as misspellings and transposed numbers, and applicants are prone to make mistakes or write illegibly on applications. The Social Security Administration has acknowledged that matches between its database and voter-registration records have yielded a 28.5 percent error rate.

Disturbingly, despite these kinds of error rates, several states have joined secretive interstate compacts that allow them to share their registration databases with each other and purge voters who supposedly show up on more than one list.

[Project Vote Executive Director Michael] Slater cites another troubling trend emerging with the implementation of statewide databases.

Several states have begun comparing databases for duplicate records of existing voters, then purging voters they believe have moved and registered in another state. The problem, Slater says, is the methods used can yield false positives, and officials are deleting voters without contacting them to verify that they've moved, or waiting for two federal election cycles to pass, which are requirements under the National Voter Rights Acts of 1993.

In 2006, Kentucky's attorney general successfully sued his state's board of elections after officials compared their list to ones from South Carolina and Tennessee and purged about 8,000 voters who appeared to have registered in those states at a later date than their registration in Kentucky and were presumed to have moved.

Project Vote is investigating Kansas, Louisiana and South Dakota for similar activity. Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri and Nebraska have also been comparing lists.

"That is a trend that will accelerate, but there are inadequate safeguards, and I think it's very, very dangerous," Slater says.

For more information, Project Vote has created materials on database matching, maintaining voting rolls, provisional ballots, and voter ID requirements.

Cross-posted at Project Vote's Voting Matters Blog

Weekly Voting Rights News Update

By Erin Ferns

In 2000, Florida’s disastrous effort to purge former felons from voter rolls resulted in the disenfranchisement of hundreds if not thousands of legitimate voters and clearly influenced the outcome of the presidential contest in that state. History may repeat itself this November with states taking potentially reckless and unlawful measures to clean voter rolls before Election Day.

Voter purges are one of several problems in the administration of elections that could not only bar legal voters from the polls, but could potentially influence the outcome of close races. Project Vote is monitoring this practice across the United States and sees what could be an alarming trend of illegal purging emerging. The New York Times and Mississippi's Clarion Ledger both reported on voter purging problems in the South this week.

Keeping accurate and current voter rolls is an important legal mandate for election officials. Under the National Voter Registration Act, states are required to contact voters directly through forwardable mail. If the voter does not respond, the state must wait two federal elections before removing the voter from the rolls. However, many states have begun to compare their voter rolls with those of neighboring states and pro-actively canceling a voter's registration based on a positive “match” rather than following the list maintenance procedures of NVRA.

Project Vote has recently expressed concern to Louisiana Secretary of State Jay Dardenne over the state's method of removing voters from rolls, as reported in the Times on Tuesday. Project Vote has learned that Louisiana compares voter lists with other jurisdictions, purging voters solely upon apparent database matches of first name, last name and birth date. With millions of people living in a multi-state region, it is not uncommon to find more than one John Smith born on the same day. Additionally, the possibility of human and typographical error that occur in all large databases creates a greater risk of unjustified disenfranchisement.

“A spokesman for Louisiana's secretary of state said that all voters found to have duplicate registrations were sent at least one warning letter and sometimes two, but that the last such actions were done some 13 months ago,” the Times reported.

“'We're specifically not doing it right in front of an election,'” said Dardenne's spokesman.
Election officials in Madison County, Miss. have recently decided to forgo a potentially illegal mass mailing process as part of their effort to purge the county’s voter rolls after the U.S. Justice Department and others warned against it, according the Clarion Ledger Tuesday. Last week, Project Vote sent a letter to the elections commission out of concern that their mass mailing plan violated the Voting Rights Act.

“They are doing something that is understandable when you have a voter roll that appears to be out of proportion,” said voting rights lawyers who works with Project Vote, Estelle Rogers. “But there are a lot of Ps and Qs that must be followed.”

County supervisor Karl Banks repeatedly voted against the mass mailing, saying that “his understanding of the law was that commissioners needed a reason to believe that a voter's information may not be accurate.” He argued that in this presidential election year, the commission should focus on making sure elections run smoothly, such as informing people of their correct precinct.

“The mildest things confuse people and can ultimately disenfranchise people during elections...Here we are wanting to disenfranchise people because they don't send a card back?”

The emerging trend of state compacts to compare voter databases and engage in aggressive efforts to purge their voter rolls is troubling for both its opacity – the public is not informed of the criteria for being purged nor are purged voters offered the chance to remedy the situation – and its reliance on strict matching criteria. Large databases are riddled with errors, therefore the sole reliance on exact matches virtually guarantees that legal voters will be knocked off the rolls and denied the right to vote.
The Florida example from 2000 should be instructive on on how these practices could affect the outcome of closely contested races on Election Day.

Quick Links:

Contact:

Louisiana Secretary of State Jay Dardenne

Madison County (Miss.) Board of Supervisors

Reports:

“Maintaining Current and Accurate Voters Lists.” Project Vote. Dec. 22, 2006.

“A Summary of the National Voter Registration Act.” Project Vote.

“A Summary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.” Project Vote.

In Other News:

Federal judge weighs challenge to AZ voter id law - Tucson Citizen [Ariz.]
PHOENIX (AP) -- A federal judge is weighing a challenge to Arizona requirements for voter identification and proof of citizenship for registering to vote.

County voter drive blocked: Fewer New Citizens Registered After US Agency Changes Rule - Mercury News [Ca.]
It was a procedure that produced a bumper crop of new voters: Just before Santa Clara County immigrants were sworn in as U.S. citizens, they got voter-registration cards and were shown how to fill them out. At the conclusion of the naturalization ceremony, most new citizens had signed the cards and handed them in to become registered voters.

State Says It May Sue VA - Associated Press
Connecticut officials say the state might sue the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs if it continues to block efforts to educate and register voters in federal veterans' facilities.

Voter-sign-up drive targets 16-year olds - Miami Herald
Voter registration for next month's primary election will end Monday, and the push now is aimed at teens who are too young to cast a ballot

Erin Ferns is a Research and Policy Analyst with Project Vote’s Strategic Writing and Research Department (SWORD).