Choice Point in CA?! THOUSANDS already kicked off of voter rolls.

New ID System May Block Voters
A statewide database has rejected otherwise valid registrations because of computer glitches or slight discrepancies in the spelling of names.
By Jordan Rau, Times Staff Writer
March 29, 2006

SACRAMENTO — Thousands of Californians who register to vote or update their records may not receive sample ballots or be able to vote as absentees because of the state's new method of verifying identities, election officials say.

A new statewide database designed by Secretary of State Bruce McPherson to authenticate voter registrations has blocked otherwise valid registrations because of computer glitches, slight discrepancies in spelling or incomplete applications.

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In Los Angeles County, the database rejected 14,629 people — 43% of those who registered from Jan. 1 to March 15. Officials are trying to resolve the problems in time for municipal elections April 11 in 14 cities in the county. They say the challenge will be far larger for the June 6 primary, which will involve many more voters.

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Ashley Snee Giovannettone, spokeswoman for McPherson, who oversees elections, said a sampling of statewide registrations found that 74% were immediately verified. She said state election law requires county officials to resolve the discrepancies for the others, which might mean fixing a typo or contacting the voter to obtain missing information.

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State Sen. Debra Bowen (D-Marina del Rey), who chairs the Senate elections committee and is running in the Democratic primary to challenge McPherson, said: "We're looking at the potential for thousands and thousands of people to lose the right to vote."

LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS OF CALIFORNIA

801 12th Street, Suite 220, Sacramento, California 95814
(916) 442-7215 P Fax (916) 442-7362
Web site: www.lwvc.org P E-mail: lwvc@lwvc.org



March 28, 2006

The Honorable Bruce McPherson
Secretary of State of California
1500 11th Street
Sacramento, California 95814

Dear Secretary McPherson:

The League of Women Voters of California is concerned that under new state procedures for adding registered voters to the CalVoter state database, it appears that a large number of registrations are being inappropriately rejected.

The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 requires each state to implement, by January 1, 2006, “a single, uniform, official, centralized, interactive computerized statewide voter registration list.” Recognizing that the state of California would not have such a database in place by that deadline, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the California Secretary of State entered into a memorandum of agreement to update and use the existing CalVoter registration system for HAVA compliance. Emergency regulations were adopted by the Secretary of State to implement that memorandum.

Judging from statistics compiled since the first of this year for Los Angeles County, most of the rejected registrations and re-registrations fall into one of two categories. One type of problem occurs when individuals provide a driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number (SSN) on their registration form, but their name or birth date is not exactly the same as in the DMV records. Another type of problem occurs when individuals do not provide a driver’s license number or the last four digits of their SSN on the registration form although their other information can be matched with DMV or other state agency records.

Since many registrations are in fact re-registrations prompted by a voter’s change of address, party, etc., many of these individuals have already been on the voter registration rolls in California. However, in both types of situation, the current system does not allow any of those individuals to be included in the statewide registration list.

We must object. Our procedures should guard against inappropriate elimination of legitimate voters from the system. It is not enough to allow them to cast a provisional ballot if they make it to the polls. Being excluded from the registration list means that they will not receive a sample ballot or a ballot pamphlet, they will not receive notice of the location of their polling places, and they will not be permitted to request an absentee ballot.

We hope that a resolution to this problem can be reached quickly. We urge you to find alternatives to the current rules (data standards and match criteria) for processing registrations. If possible, that would be done by administrative procedures available to you. However, if it proves that legislation is needed, the LWVC would support that approach.

Under HAVA, it is intended that information provided by other databases, such as DMV data, will supplement the information provided by voters when they register or re-register, thereby helping to correct an application so it can be processed and accepted, if the applicant is eligible, instead of rejected.

It is a well-known problem that mistakes are made in database administration and management. Applicants transpose or forget numbers and letters, and make other noncritical errors as well. Officials likewise inadvertently make data entry errors. Databases themselves maintain these errors over time, compounding problems if databases are compared and matched with each other.

A well-run system will use the wide variety of information that is available from a number of sources to make corrections in order to maintain an accurate system. If, for example, the applicant transposes digits in his or her driver’s license number, as evidenced by the driver’s license record, a correction is made and the application is processed.

The corollary is that a failure to match the applicant or his/her data with another database must not result in the rejection of the applicant. This is important for a variety of reasons. First, matching is not an eligibility requirement under HAVA or state law. Second, the database information is likely to have significant errors. The Social Security Administration acknowledges that its data is not foolproof, data entry and other errors in DMV and voter registration agencies are well known, and simple matching mistakes—from the use of different forms of names to transposed or missing numbers—are significant. Third, the absence of information does not suggest a problem. Only positive information of a disqualifying characteristic should result in the rejection of a voter in a database matching system. Rejection must be based on a positive match of the identity of the voter, and a positive match with a disqualifying characteristic.

In the voter registration context, the failure to find a match does not provide information that the voter is ineligible. If there is no match, the voter registration application should be processed on its own terms.

If the applicant is eligible to vote, then his or her name should be entered on the list. If necessary, the applicant can be placed on a “pending” list of individuals who receive the normal election materials and services but must provide identification (if a first-time voter) or swear to his or her identity in order to cast a normal ballot.

Uniform and nondiscriminatory practices are important for any process concerning the registration of voters. We must not go into this election season burdened by processes that disenfranchise voters.

Sincerely,

/signed/ Jacqueline Jacobberger
President

Thousands of voters dumped off California’s voting rolls
March 29th, 2006

I just learned of an alarming development in our fight for fair and transparent elections: The current Secretary of State, Bruce McPherson, launched a statewide voter registration database system last year that will disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters in California.

More than 14,000 new voter registration and re-registration applications just from Los Angeles County were recently invalidated under this new stringent set of regulations — and other counties are seeing similar results.

This is a 43% rejection rate! In fact, virtually all of these applications would have been accepted before Secretary McPherson rolled out his new statewide voter registration database. Typically rejection rates are 1-2%. This is outrageous.

And these applications were rejected for trivial matters — a name or driver’s license number not perfectly matching what was on file in the statewide database, for example. Or even technical system errors that prevented valid applications from being accepted.

We’re talking about thousands of eligible voters, many of whom have been registered for years, being thrown off the voter rolls. Unless they correct these trivial errors with their local registrar, these fellow citizens won’t receive sample ballots in the mail, notifying them of their polling place. They won’t receive absentee ballots. In other words, it will be much more difficult for them to get their legitimate vote counted.

If eligible voters are prevented from registering to vote, I view that as a huge problem for our democracy — I’m sorry Secretary McPherson doesn’t see it that way. We are aggressively looking into this serious issue — and we’ll keep you posted on what we find.

– Debra

DEMOCRACY CRUMBLING: New Electronic Voter Registration Database Rejects 43% of New Los Angeles Voter Applications! 26% Rejected State-Wide in California!
Applications That Don't Match EXACTLY With DMV Records are Automatically Dumped by New System!
California's League of Women Voters Sends Letter of Objection to Secretary of State

We've been dreading this. And you're not gonna like it either. It's an entirely new can of worms in the Electronic Rape of American Electoral Democracy. The next wave -...

We've been dreading this. And you're not gonna like it either.

It's an entirely new can of worms in the Electronic Rape of American Electoral Democracy. The next wave -- beyond the electronic voting machines, and perhaps even more alarming -- in the arsenal of those out to game the system for partisan advantage.

No matter what we do, no matter how many successes, the Bad Guys -- those who hate Democracy and American Values -- are always one step ahead of us, it seems.

The horrifically written and, of course, ironically named "Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002" requires, as of January 1, 2006, each state to implement "a single, uniform, official, centralized, interactive computerized statewide voter registration list."

And guess who's writing the software for it, in California, Ohio and elsewhere? That's right...our old friends at Diebold, Inc.

While we've put off reporting on much of this until now -- as prompted by story out today (in the MSM of all places!) -- we've been working on an extremely disturbing part of this story for some time relating directly to all of this out in, you guessed it, Ohio. We've yet to run the story for a number of reasons. But we hope to have much more on it, in all its troubling detail, in the not-too-distant future.

For today, however, we'll stick to the report coming out of California in this morning's Los Angeles Times which says that, since the first of year, when California's new computerized Voter Registration Database has gone state-wide, Los Angeles County has "rejected 14,629 people — 43% of those who registered from Jan. 1 to March 15."

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