Voter Registration Ridiculousness: How Ohio is About To Disenfranchise Thousands on Technicalities

I'm having flashbacks to my time working with juries as I'm reading this report out of Ohio, now highlighted in red on the Drudge Report. From the article:

CINCINNATI (AP) - Close to one in every three newly registered Ohio voters will end up on court-ordered lists being sent to county election boards because they have some discrepancy in their records, an elections spokesman said Wednesday.

Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner estimated that an initial review found that about 200,000 newly registered voters reported information that did not match motor-vehicle or Social Security records, Brunner spokesman Kevin Kidder said. Some discrepancies could be as simple as a misspelling, while others could be more significant.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati sided with the Ohio Republican Party on Tuesday and ordered Brunner to set up a system that provides those names to county elections boards. The GOP contends the information will help prevent fraud.

On the surface, this sounds very sinister. 200,000 irregularities in voter registration information? In a year where Democrats are engaging in enormous voter registration efforts? Is something amiss?

The answer is probably not. Any time that you're creating a vast new list of people based on information that they fill out quickly with the help of other people, you create innumerable ways in which this information will not match up against past records. I saw this a lot when working with jury administrators and clerks across the country as they worked to update their jury lists - which actually use voter registration lists very, very frequently all across the country.

What kind of irregularities? Let us pick out one big one - which is actually one of the biggest problems jury administrators face in summonsing people to serve.

Anybody who drives knows what a joy it is to go to the DMV. Long lines, rude clerks, inexplicable delays, confusing requirements...in general, it is not a pleasant experience. As a result, a lot of people avoid it at all costs.

So, a quick poll - how many of you have your current address listed on your driver's licence?

If you don't, and you're a new Ohio voter registered at your new Ohio address - congratulations. You almost definitely qualify as one of the 200,000 irregularities the article mentions.

Across the country, it has been widely reported that youth voter registrations are through the roof. Rock the Vote, for example, has registered over two million young people in the 2008 election cycle, in what they call the largest youth registration drive in history. In Virgina, 40 percent of new registrants are under the age of 25, and using the numbers Virginia has released, that amounts to approximately 174,400 new, youthful voters. I don't have specific statistics for Ohio, but I expect that they would mirror these national trend.

What's the point? Well, young people move. A lot. They go to college, they change apartments, they move out of their parents' homes, they get new roommates. They move a lot more than older people. According to the Census, 25% of people aged 18-29 changed residences from 2006 to 2007, compared to 10% of those aged 30-69, and 13% when you look at all residents. And consequently, it is FAR more likely that their voter registration information will not match their driver's licenses on record with the DMV.

So let's use similar statistics for Ohio that we have for Virginia, for sake of argument. If even 30% of the newly registered voters in Ohio were young people, that would mean 198,000 of the 666,000 Ohioans who have registered to vote since January are under the age of 25. So using the national averages, 25% of those voters moved in the last year, or 49,500 people. This number is actually probably larger, as it would compound over the multiple years between elections - but I'm just using simple math for this argument. If half of that number didn't update their driver's license before registering to vote, you've just found about 25,000 people of Ohio's 200,000 with irregularities

This is, of course, rough math and approximation. But it is meant to illustrate that these types of irregularities can result from completely innocuous, innocent activity that is NOT indicative of some kind of sinister intention.

These are the irregularities that are now forcing the Ohio Secretary of State to create some kind of database that will provide these names to elections officials by this FRIDAY, so they can begin to verify this information independently. So elections officials - in addition to everything else that they have to do - will have to somehow manage to contact 200,000 new voters to verify their information. Another quote from the article cited at the top of this page:

County election officials were trying to determine Wednesday how they will respond once they get the information.

"I'm very concerned with these new requirements as we get closer to Election Day," said Steve Harsman, director of the Montgomery County Board of Elections in Dayton. He said his staff already is working 16 hours a day, seven days a week.

"It's clearly going to have an impact in regard to resources we have to expend to resolve discrepancies," said Jeff Hastings, chairman of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections in Cleveland.

If they fail to resolve these discrepancies before election day, voters will probably have to cast a provisional ballot - which may or may not be counted. From the article, by an Ohio State professor:

Even worse, in some states the provisional voting process operates very differently in different localities within the state. In Ohio in 2006, percentages of provisional ballots that were both cast and counted varied wildly regardless of demographics, a strong indication that different county boards were applying their own rules in the face of insufficiently specific directives from the state. States must have basic, uniform rules in place on these matters to prevent different counties within the states from applying their own rules and thereby opening the state up to voting rights lawsuits based on equal protection.

Is it possible that within those 200,000 registrants that there are some serious offenders? Yes. But given how easily these kind of discrepancies can arise, is it worth a potential problem for the entire electorate? You tell me.