Voter Fraud Frighteners: Citing the wrong statistics, fixing the wrong problems

• 106 votes were clerical errors by poll workers – mistakes like marking John Doe Sr. instead of John Doe Jr.

• 56 votes were “bad data matching” – meaning the state Department of Motor Vehicles, which raised concerns about zombie voters, was wrong in assuming the voters were dead.

• 32 votes were “voter participation errors,” meaning someone was credited as voting in an election when they did not, most likely because of a stray mark on the voter rolls that was electronically scanned to record a voter’s participation.

• Three ballots were cast absentee by voters who died before Election Day.

Ehrlich suggested that there needs to be more focus on our broken elections systems, and that is in fact the subject of the Pew report he cited. Pew’s study, titled “Inaccurate, Costly, and Inefficient,” like its 2010 study, “Upgrading Democracy,” focuses on upgrades to a voter registration system with paper-based, 19th-century origins that “has not kept pace with advancing technology and a mobile society.” Canada, for example, spends 12 times less than the U.S. in maintaining a nationalized database: less than 35 cents per voter, and 93 percent of its eligible population is registered. Along with guarding against registration fraud and inaccuracies, technological upgrades would benefit candidates and campaigns, Pew argues, the kind of thing one would think politicians and parties would welcome:

Accurate lists also will allow political campaigns and nonpartisan efforts to avoid wasting time and money reaching out to registrants who have moved, died, are ineligible, or otherwise are no longer voting in a jurisdiction.

Voter lists are inaccurate because of bad data entry, because people register at their new addresses and don’t de-register at their old ones. Neither do relatives typically take death certificates down to the Board of Elections to have their deceased family members removed. Massive home foreclosures in recent years have made matters worse. The flood of election year paper voter registrations delivered by independent groups is a logistical headache. In fact, dead people remain on the voter rolls because states must comply with federal and state law in purging inactive voters from their lists. In North Carolina (where I live) the general guidelines are explained here. Unless the dead person requests to be removed (unlikely), he or she will remain on the list for eight years (four federal election cycles) before being purged. And voter ID laws fix that how?

Keeping a database up to date costs money and manhours. Yet how many Frighteners are so concerned about the dead voting that they are prepared to pay more in taxes – to pay whatever it takes – to keep their sacred registration lists pristine?

I didn’t think so.

Fortunately, Pew’s working group of over three dozen experts from over 20 states believes that a modern registration system could keep lists more accurate and lower costs by pursuing technology upgrades in three areas:

1. Comparing registration lists with other data sources to broaden the base of information used to update and verify voter rolls.

2. Using proven data-matching techniques and security protocols to ensure accuracy and security.

3. Establishing new ways voters can submit information online and minimize manual data entry, resulting in lower costs and fewer errors.

So, did that Pew report recommend photo ID as a plausible fix for the dead voter problem? Uh, no.

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