Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 2 | Election Reform: Lessons From 2004, page 3

Impaired Voter-Registration Systems
The prospect of all states receiving HAVA funds implementing statewide voter-registration databases by 2006 promises a welcome improvement to a patchwork system of incompatible local systems, experts note, pointing out that voters in the 17 states that had such databases in 2004 had fewer reported problems.

However, HAVA did not address the problem of widely disparate voter-registration standards and their sometimes arbitrary application. These will continue to unfairly prevent many eligible citizens from voting, unless there are improvements. Such problems include overly complex application forms, arbitrary denials of eligibility, inability by election offices to process applications and inability of many voters to verify their registration on or before election day with telephone hotlines busy or unanswered.

For example, Ohio’s secretary of state instructed county officials to reject completed voter registration forms not printed on card stock, which threatened to invalidate tens of thousands of forms that had been duplicated on more commonly used paper. He later reversed that decision. Florida’s secretary of state ordered officials to throw out registration forms on which applicants failed to check a box saying they are citizens, even though elsewhere on the forms, they signed a statement affirming their citizenship.

Students in numerous college towns continued to face similar problems when local election officials attempted to bar them from registering to vote there, claiming that they were not “permanent residents” and must register in their hometowns instead. This was settled long ago when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1979 (United States. v. Symm) that students could do just that, but it remains a perennial localized problem.

In one egregious case, a Texas district attorney threatened to prosecute Prairie View A&M students if they tried to register to vote there. According to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, “While some cases of local voter suppression can be attributed to misinformation due to a lack of guidance from the state, most are the result of concerted efforts to prevent students from affecting local politics.”

Persistent problems in managing voter-registration databases to eliminate registration of deceased voters or duplicate registrations of those who move to another jurisdiction also continue to plague our system. Over 181,000 dead people, for example, were registered to vote in the 2004 presidential election in six battleground states, nearly 65,000 in Florida, according to a Chicago Tribune analysis.

An added problem is arbitrary registration deadlines, which prevent many people from voting and further suppress voter turnout. “Thirty-seven states cut off voter registration 20 to 30 days before election day, well before most voters become interested in the campaigns,” reports the nonpartisan group, Demos.

Disenfranchisement of Ex-Felons
An estimated 4.7 million Americans cannot vote because they were convicted of felony crimes. They are barred by a patchwork of state laws that include lifetime bans, and other penalties, although two states preserve the right to vote while in prison. While many states offer restoration of rights by state clemency boards, the procedures are often so cumbersome that most ex-felons in these states do not or cannot overcome this hurdle.

The result is the disenfranchisement of over two percent of all adults and, because of their higher rates of incarceration, thirteen percent of black men. In states with lifetime bans, one-fourth of black men are disqualified. Because of its lifetime ban, for instance, Florida had an estimated 620,000 ex-felons unable to vote in the 2000 presidential election. The problem was compounded when Florida elections officials produced ex-felon lists in 2000 and 2004 that were so inaccurate that they barred or would have barred thousands of qualified citizens from voting. Many suspect that this affected the 2000 election outcome, given that most ex-felons register and vote Democratic, and was roundly criticized by Democrats as a politically biased action by Republican state officials.

The inaccuracy of ex-felon purge lists and the incompatibility of criminal record databases with voter registration databases can also lead to eligible citizens losing their right to vote. Courts and election officials do not use common identifiers, such as driver’s license numbers, requiring guesswork involving a mix of names, addresses and birth dates. Another complication can be the lack of statewide court data, so that a felony conviction in one county may not be reflected in the voter rolls in another county.

Republicans counter that, until such bans change, voting by ex-felons remains illegal, while many Democratic elections officials tolerate them, and that this can decide a close election. Analyses by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Seattle Times found that several hundred ex-felons either did or may have voted illegally in the razor-thin Washington State governor’s race. Similar reports in other states led to Republican criticism. “The Republican Party’s top priority is to have every valid vote counted. But the truth of the matter is that there are issues with improper registrations,” says Ben Ginsberg, former counsel to the Republican National Committee.

Inadequate Election System Resources
The nation’s 3,000-plus counties spend an estimated $1 billion a year for election administration, according to a 2001 report of the Voting Technology Project by MIT and CalTech experts, funded by Carnegie Corporation. Despite increased federal funding for state and local election agencies, it has not been enough to fully fund the elections administration improvements required by HAVA.

As a result, resources have not kept pace with the growing demands for a modern, accurate, fair elections system. Long waits at polling places, called the “three-hour poll tax” by some, create unnecessary barriers and cause many voters to leave before voting or to forego voting entirely. “After an hour [of waiting in line] you cross a threshold into a problem. After two hours you’re getting into the disenfranchisement zone,” says Ed Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University.

Lack of election day staff, poorly trained poll workers, lack of facilities and machines to accommodate disabled voters, and malfunctioning or too few voting machines are causes of this perennial, but avoidable problem. Counties hard-pressed to fund other basic services often poorly fund their election offices. “One-quarter of our [local] election offices are as well funded as other parts of government, but the other three-quarters are not,” Doug Lewis of The Election Center told a U.S. Senate committee in 2001.

Americans vote in polling places that range from plush to awful, MIT voting technology expert Ted Selker found during a coast-to-coast tour in the fall of 2004. Reno, Nevada, had the cushiest, he wrote in a post-election report, while voters in other sites struggled with poor lighting, inaccessible buildings, cold and drafty rooms and, in Chicago, “a homeless shelter that smells of urine.” One polling place in Lee County, Alabama, had only two voting machines for over 10,000 registered voters, according to another report.

Next page: Other problems create additional concerns about voter participation and voting integrity, including accommodations for disabled voters; the choice of election days; the lack of competitive presidential, Congressional and other races; Electoral College campaign strategies that reduce voter choice in “safe” states; and partisan actions by state and local election officials.

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