Friday’s Computerworld has an interesting article about problems with the new California statewide voter registration database. According to the report, in the past three months about 43 percent of voter registration forms in Los Angeles County were rejected. Alademda County’s rejection rate was about 10 percent. Although the article is a little vague, the likely cause is data entry errors that cause conflicts when the voter database is compared against the motor vehicle database.
This cross-checking is a new requirement under the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). HAVA requires that states authenticate each potential voter by cross-checking with other state databases. If a potential voter does not have a state driver’s license, then the last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number must be used for authentication.
We recently issued a report USACM commissioned looking at statewide voter registration databases, and the cross-checking of databases was one of the key issues the study committee identified (page 23). Because data entry errors are a significant problem and databases (voter or motor vehicle) can be inaccurate, the study committee recommended that:
- When other databases, such as driver registration databases, are used to check for eligibility, those databases should be used for screening and not to automatically enroll or de-enroll voters.
- An automated check can be used to flag some voters for further scrutiny, but the final determination of eligibility should be performed only by an appropriate election official.
Apparently under the California system, any errors are kicked out for manual checking. While the Computerworld article notes criticism of the rigid cross-checking protocol, what is encouraging is that they are manually checking these errors instead of automatically dumping these potential voters. However, the article also points out the problem the timing when dealing with these errors:
The registration information takes a week to process into the Alameda database before it is sent to the state database for matching, which can take up to five days, Ginnold said. “We would get the kick-outs only a few days before the election – which won’t allow enough time to manually validate them,” she said.
Closing voter registration well before an election, or adding additional staff to deal with the manual checking may be the only ways to ensure that voters aren’t disenfranchised.
Cameron posted this at 12:10 pm ET | Filed in E-voting | Permanent Link |Trackbacks
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