Questions and Challenges Surround Voter Registration

In a year that has seen record numbers of new voters thanks to widespread registration campaigns, many feel that the presidential election could hinge on those citizens new to the system.

However, as the New York Times reported on Wednesday, tens of thousands of voters “have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked from registering,” many through questionably legal measures.

Notably, many of these measures are being implemented in potentially pivotal swing states, such as Ohio, Indiana and Michigan.

While there has been a concerted effort to rid the rolls of ineligible voters in accordance with the Help America Vote Act of 2002, The New York Times reports that in some states, for every new voter added to the rolls in the past two months, two voters have been dropped from the rolls.

The Act required all states to compile comprehensive lists of eligible voters into a single database. However, the voter registration databases, some designed by companies that build electronic voting machines, aren’t federally tested, and “some have been plagued by missed deadlines, rushed production schedules, cost overruns, security problems, and design and reliability issues,” according to Wired magazine. 

Due to the large number of voters dropped, many will not be notified of their removal until Election Day, long after they might have been able to do anything about it.

According to The New York Times study, Michigan and Colorado saw thousands of names dropped from the rolls in recent weeks, even though federal law forbids their removal within 90 days of a national election, except in cases of death, notification of relocation out of state or if they are deemed officially unfit to vote.

A closer look at the two states showed that those names purged from the rolls since Aug. 1 far exceeded the number of residents who had died or relocated out of the states.

Meanwhile, Indiana, North Carolina, Nevada and Ohio have improperly used social security numbers to verify registrations, a method that, under federal law, is intended to be a last resort.

This method flags those registrations that do not match up with the social security rolls. In Ohio, the state’s Republican Party has filed a motion to require that any voter who has been flagged must clear up the discrepancy or vote using a provisional ballot.