Thinking about Elections

THE VOTING WARS. Claims of voter fraud often target the list of registered voters. Voters who have moved, died, or otherwise become ineligible to vote need to be removed from the list. That might sound simple, but it’s not. Take moving: according to the US Census, >100 million people moved between 2015-2020. How does a jurisdiction know when a voter has moved?

Some states belong to organizations that cross-check member voter data. (See ERICstates.org) But that’s voluntary and piecemeal. There’s no uniform national template for voter registration lists. The 50 separate voter lists are not interoperable. While social security numbers could be used to crosscheck for voters registered in multiple places, federal laws largely prevent that for reasons of privacy and security risk. So, when groups purporting to examine the accuracy of voter list maintenance use publicly available information, it yields false positive matches, e.g., there are multiple voters named John Smith who share the same birthday.

Typically, when a voter hasn’t voted for some period of time or number of elections, usually 4-5 years, it triggers a process that takes another 4-5 years before a voter can be removed from the voter rolls. The length of time is deliberate; no one can be removed from the voter list precipitously. But the point is that voter registration lists will necessarily have voters who moved and whose registration will eventually be cancelled.

Voter list maintenance might seem boring, but it’s the backbone of elections. Since the Constitution gives states authority for elections, there’s no easy path to centralizing voter registration, but we could have a nationwide system of unique identifiers for voters that could be administered/assigned to voters by each state. That would be a big step to help coordinate voter registration lists across states.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4396446