So today we’re told that 105% of eligible voters in Marion County are registered to vote. (H/T: Tam.)
Can you say ACORN fraud? I thought you could. But while I’m sure ACORN is involved in this up to their armpits (eww! smelly hippies!), I imagine there’s another problem that accounts for a lot of this — and that’s simply duplicate registrations still on the books after people move.
Screwed-up registrar lists have been a problem in Marion County (and probably other counties as well) for a long time. My mother hasn’t voted in our precinct since she moved in February 2006 — and has re-registered in her new precinct — but she still shows up on our precinct roll every time we go to vote.
Beth White’s office probably loves that. They’ll have someone vote that registration for Obama, and we’ll never know about it. Sadly, Beth White’s office is no stranger to charges of voter fraud.
The basic problem is that when you move, even though there is a method for changing your voter registration address, the Board of Elections doesn’t ever seem to follow through. They send you a new registration card for your new address, but then they just keep printing the same old voter lists in your old precinct year after year, claiming that after x number of elections (whatever the value of x is) any unvoted names will fall off the roll. The problem is that they don’t, and I can only assume malice aforethought, because no programmer is so dumb that they couldn’t fix this problem. And of course if you move out of the county, nobody in the old county is probably even made aware that you moved.
My proposal to fix this is to give the whole thing over to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and make voter registration a state-level function rather than depend on municipalities to (mis-)handle it.
Yeah, I know, I know, the BMV. Stick with me for a minute.
If BMV can hand out motor-voter registration forms and free state IDs to the poor and indignant (er…I mean, “indigent”), maybe BMV should also be handling state-wide voter registration. The way things are improving at BMV, they’d do a far better job than the Marion County Election Board. And it would be a statewide registration — if you were to move, and went to get a new license and re-register your cars, that would be one more thing that could be changed at the same time. That way a completely new voter record wouldn’t be created (with the hope that the old one would “fall off” the roll at some ill-defined interval in the future) and it would be impossible for anyone to vote in two different places in the same election.
I’m sure it’s not that easy. But the fact is that the state of Indiana requires that you must change the address on your driver’s license and vehicle registrations within 6 months of moving. I cannot for the life of me fathom why there isn’t a similar requirement for voter registration, and why the state hasn’t required county election boards to see to it or just taken over that function at the state level to begin with.
Hey Mitch. Are you listening? This is the next step after whacking what’s left of township government on the head.
One Reply to “Voter registration reform”
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I am commenting here because I wanted to comment on your post below regarding the ‘105% of voting age population in Marion County is registered to vote’ post, but there is no link for that.
[Blog owner’s note: I’ve moved this comment to the post in question. I have to close comments on older posts from time to time in order to avoid spambots choking them up. Sorry about that.]
The reason for this is that when people move away or die, they (or their survivors) almost never inform the county elections department that they won’t be voting any longer in that precinct. As a result, voter registration rolls all over this country are inevitably filled with the names of people who don’t vote. Some elections departments make an effort to clean up the rolls; others don’t bother.
[Sure. That’s what I said, more or less.]
An internal audit of the county elections department where I live, pulled 136 random names off the voter rolls. Here’s what they found:
Only 16 (12 percent) were valid
94 had moved out of the county
11 were felons
8 were dead
4 were mentally incapacitated
3 had other problems
Personally, from my experience I believe that this sample somewhat overstates the problem; however the larger point absolutely holds. That is, that the ratio of registered voters to the number of citizens who are eligible to vote in a given county is virtually meaningless unless the county elections department is diligent about purging the rolls, something which is difficult to do since Americans generally don’t feel the need to inform government bureaucrats every time they change their address.
[Which is why I advocate voter registration becoming a state-level function rather than a county- or municipality-level function. Ten years ago I would have shuddered at asking our BMV to handle that responsibility, but today I think they could handle it without any trouble. Since we require picture ID for voting in Indiana (and thank you to the Supreme Court for upholding our picture ID law), it makes sense to tie voter registration to driver’s licenses and state ID cards.]