Voter Purges Could Cause Florida-like Presidential Recounts

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet. Posted October 9, 2008.

With less than four weeks to go before the 2008 presidential vote, new practices in key swing states to update voter rolls are coming under fire for mistakes that could involve rejecting tens of thousands of legitimate voters, suggesting that close vote counts in these states could lead to legal fights echoing Florida's presidential recount in 2000.

According to a New York Times report on Oct. 9, key swing states -- including Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Missouri -- have been using federal Social Security data to verify voter registration information from established and potential voters. The Social Security data, which is used to authenticate voters' identity but is known to be error-prone, has been used to purge "tens of thousands" of voters already on voter rolls, the Times reported, as well as to reject numerous new voter registration applications.

Of 7.7 million inquiries by states to the Social Security Administration to verify voter applications in 2008, nearly 2.4 million resulted in "non matches," according to the agency, which Monday issued a statement urging election officials in six states -- Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio -- to "review their procedures."

This past summer, AlterNet reported that Michigan, Kansas and Louisiana were using drivers' license databases in a similar manner to purge voters. In both instances, whether using Social Security or motor vehicle data, it is difficult to fully know how voter rolls will be affected because different states and counties have differing procedures on purging and removing voters, and because this process is often secretive.

What's clear to leading voting rights attorneys, however, is that this "name-matching" process not only violates the guiding federal law on removing voters, the National Voter Registration Act, and violates the guiding federal law on accepting vote registrations, the National Voting Rights Act, but also creates a new basis to challenge presidential results if the vote count is close on November 4.

Unless there is litigation to force states to follow these federal laws before Election Day and restore purged voters and accept registrations from new voters, a close vote count in swing states could see post-Election Day legal fights over provisional ballots. These are ballots issued to voters whose names are not on voter lists and are later validated before they are counted. Thus, a fight over provisional ballots in 2008 could echo the fight over hanging chads -- or punches in paper ballots -- in Florida in 2000.

"I think it is a real risk," said Brenda Wright, legal director of The National Voting Rights Institute at Demos, a public interest law firm. "If you have a situation where people are showing up who think they are registered to vote, that is where provisional ballots come in. The question is will those ballots be counted. If there are thousands of provisional ballots in a number of states, there's a danger that they may not all be counted."

"There will be an effort by the civil rights community to figure out what to do," said Jon Greenbaum, Voting Rights Program director at the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

"There is the potential the perfect storm is developing," said Gerry Hebert, executive director of the Campaign Legal Center, another public-interest law firm. "New voters should be added to the rolls immediately, and then vetted and sent letters if there are problems."

The scenario of post-Election Day litigation is not speculation. Across the country, GOP partisans already have filed lawsuits over voter registration issues or said they planned to pursue polling place challenges of individual voter registrations in states such as Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan. In federal court in Ohio, a hearing was held Thursday on a GOP suit seeking to force the state to use the Social Security data to vet new voters.

"It does add a whole other dimension to the potential debates on what is the vote," said Kimball Brace, director of Election Data Services, a Washington consulting firm. "I was Al Gore's expert in Florida on this. ... In 2000, we were concerned with the voting equipment, and what happened with under- and over-votes. Now, if you are a lawyer looking at challenges, you don't only look at that but at the voter side as well."

Roots of the Problem

The name-matching issue has its roots in the federal legislation that was passed after the 2000 presidential election debacle in Florida -- the Help America Vote Act of 2002. Under that law, states were instructed to compile statewide voter lists in contrast to lists that previously were maintained at the local level. States also were allowed to use Social Security data to verify registrations, but only as a last resort after other forms of voter ID could not be corroborated.

See more stories tagged with: department of justice, voter suppression, 2008 election, voting rights act, common cause, demos, swing states, voter purges, campaign legal center, voter challenges, selective enforcement, help america vote act, voter registration databa, national voting right ins, kim brace, tova wang, brenda wright

Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at Alternet.org and author of Count My Vote: A Citizen's Guide to Voting (AlterNet Books, 2008).

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