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Americans used to agree on this point: it’s not good for a person to be registered to vote four or five times at once. These days, even mentioning shortcomings in American elections is polarizing.
Improving election administration doesn’t have to be so polarizing.
That polarization is unfortunate because facts matter. All the evidence shows our voter rolls are inaccurate, and the solutions are not difficult.
States have duplicate and outdated voter registrations in numbers that demand a solution, and that solution need not be expensive or controversial.
Consider Rashawn Slade. Slade was registered to vote in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, seven separate times. Duplicate registrations like Slade’s can be discovered merely by sorting voter rolls by name, then by address.
When multiple registrations share the same name, birthday, and address, there is a problem.
Slade isn’t a one-off. All over the country, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) has found mountains of duplicate registrations. The organization has alerted election officials or filed complaints to fix the problem. They did what any state election office could do. Scan the voter rolls and peg thousands of duplicate registrations.
Small differences in voter registration applications can produce two registrations. Middle initials or full names, inconsistent suffix use, transposed numbers in birthdates — all of these can create a second registration because they do not perfectly match an existing registration.
California, New York, and South Texas are producing more duplicates than other parts of the country. One reason is the wider variety of diacritics in Spanish or other non-English names. Accent marks, tildes, or a dieresis are not handled uniformly by election officials keying new registrations into a database.
State voter databases aren’t always programmed to incorporate accented letters.
Non-uniform treatment of anything, even an accent mark, can create a duplicate registration. Election officials are trained to presume registration and to not deny registration unless it is completely clear the person trying to register is the same.
The question for the nation is: what does “completely clear” mean? How much confidence that the applicant is already registered is needed before registration can be denied?
The Left will say perfection, and the Right will say less than that.
PILF looked at voter rolls in Maine, Ohio, Iowa, Texas, California, Pennsylvania, New York, North Carolina, Michigan, and Alaska. Duplicate registrations number in the thousands.
Spaces matter too. Patty McDougal versus Mc Dougal can yield a second registration in just about any state.
Nobody should defend that. Nobody should make excuses.
It isn’t hard to find them and fix them. Election officials have been informed of these problems. They should endeavor to fix them.
Yet some states are hiding mistakes by not providing voter rolls to experts experienced in helping find mistakes like duplicates. States like South Carolina and Utah are fighting in court to block access to the state voter roll.
Denying access to voter rolls prevents states from learning about problems. Congress wanted list maintenance records to be public. In 1993, Congress included a public records provision in the Motor Voter law.
All of this is made worse by automatic mail voting. Thankfully, Rashawn Slade’s seven registrations were in Pennsylvania. If they were in California, Slade would automatically get seven ballots. Any state with automatic mail elections makes the duplicate-registration problem worse by automatically sending multiple ballots.
No American should defend that. Fixing the system so multiple ballots don’t go to a single voter isn’t controversial or partisan. Improving errors and mistakes on the voter rolls is something we can all agree on.
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J. Christian Adams is the president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a former Justice Department attorney, and a commissioner on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
