In a different thread Dragonlady challenged me to lay out the states that refuse to open their voter roles for audit. Right after the 2016 election the ERIC system was adopted to gather data about voter roles and what goes on in elections concerning elections.
Now, keep in mind not all of the states participated in this, wonder why? And, the numbers were shocking considering some states in 2020 were won by as little as 11,000 votes.
So, when we talk about voter fraud, remember, the real cheat is not in that an individual voter is committing the fraud, it’s more ingrained in the system…
In 2012, the Pew Center on the States issued a report on the country’s voter registration system. The report found that “[a]pproximately 24 million—one of every eight—voter registrations” in the U.S. are “no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate.” Pew reported that more than 1.8 million registered voters were deceased and that 2.75 million individuals were registered “in more than one state.”2
Pew Center on the States, Inaccurate, Costly, and Inefficient—Evidence That America’s Voter Registration System Needs an Upgrade, Issue Brief (Feb. 2012), p. 1, https://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/l...ets/2012/pewupgradingvoterregistrationpdf.pdf.
In 2020, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) issued a similar report.3
Public Interest Legal Foundation, Critical Condition—American Voter Rolls Filled with Errors, Dead Voters, and Duplicate Registrations (Sept. 2020), https://publicinterestlegal.org/pilf-files/Report-Critical_Condition-Web-FINAL-FINAL.pdf. Hans von Spakovsky is a member of the board of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, and J. Christian Adams is its president and general counsel.
The PILF obtained voter registration and voting history data for the 2016 and 2018 elections from 42 states, supplemented those data through commercial sources (such as credit agencies) and other government databases (such as Social Security Administration death records), and then compared the data. The Foundation’s findings were disturbing:
As outlined in The Heritage Foundation’s Election Integrity Scorecard,5
- 14,608 registered voters were credited by state election officials with voting in the 2016 and 2018 elections after they had died;
- 81,649 voters who were registered twice at the same address voted twice in the 2016 and 2018 elections;
- 8,360 voters who were registered in two different states voted in both states in the 2018 election;
- 5,500 voters who were registered twice in the same state but at different addresses voted twice in the 2018 election; and
- 34,000 voters who were registered at nonresidential addresses, including casinos, gas stations, and restaurants, cast ballots in the 2018 election.4
Id. at 8.
The Heritage Foundation, Election Integrity Scorecard, The Heritage Foundation's Election Integrity Scorecard.
there is a series of best practices that can enable state election officials to maintain the accuracy of their statewide voter registration lists to find voters who have moved, have died, have become ineligible due to felony convictions, are registered more than once in the state, are not U.S. citizens, or are falsely registered somewhere in the state where they do not reside or no longer actually reside. These measures include comparing updated driver’s license records maintained by a state’s department of motor vehicles (DMV); death records in the state’s vital records office; felony conviction records from the state’s department of corrections; jury information from state and federal courts; and records on recipients of government benefits from state public assistance and welfare offices.
Since state vital records offices record only deaths occurring within the state, election officials should be checking the cumulative Social Security Master Death File to find individuals registered in the state who may have died outside of the state. However, the Social Security Administration warns that although it collects death reports from many sources, its “records are not a comprehensive record of all deaths in the country.”6
Social Security Administration, Requesting SSA’s Death Information, Requesting SSA’s Death Information | Data Exchange | SSA.
States should regularly obtain information from the U.S. Postal Service’s National Change of Address (NCOA) system, which is used by individuals to notify the Postal Service that they are moving so that mail sent to their former address will be forwarded to their new address.7
Office of Inspector General, U.S. Postal Service, National Change of Address Program, Audit Report No. IT-AR-14-010 (Sept. 24, 2014), National Change of Address Program.
The NCOA is, however, of limited use since not all individuals who move use the NCOA process, and the database does not contain any voter registration information. As the Supreme Court of the United States noted in 2018 in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, as many as “40 percent of people who move do not inform the Postal Service.”8
Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, 138 S.Ct. 1833, 1841 (2018).
Another complication is the fact that many who change their address using the NCOA system (for example, individuals who spend the summer at a vacation home or are studying overseas for a single semester) are changing their address only temporarily.
What is clear, though, is that states can obtain a great deal of the information they need to maintain the accuracy of their voter rolls by using these various in-state and federal databases, especially if they also use commercial databases such as those maintained by credit bureaus. The one thing states cannot obtain on their own from any of these databases is information on whether an individual registered in their state is also registered and voting in another state. That information can be obtained only through an agreement with other states to share their voter registration and voter history data.
Maintaining Accurate Voter Registration Rolls: The Need to Rehabilitate the ERIC Program or Form an Alternative
According to its annual report for 2017, “[t]he Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) is a non-profit organization with the sole mission of assisting states to improve the accuracy of America’s voter rolls and increase access to voter registration for all eligible citizens.”www.heritage.org
Now, keep in mind not all of the states participated in this, wonder why? And, the numbers were shocking considering some states in 2020 were won by as little as 11,000 votes.
So, when we talk about voter fraud, remember, the real cheat is not in that an individual voter is committing the fraud, it’s more ingrained in the system…
