Do you see dead people? Blame ‘Motor Voter’

By Rick Sincere | Tuesday, February 14th, 2012 | Policy

The New York Times and other media outlets are pouncing on a report from the Pew Center on the States about voter registration lists around the country. The Times‘ headline sums it up: “Voter Rolls Are Rife With Inaccuracies, Report Finds.”

The one statistic that is being shared most widely is that 1.8 million dead people remain on voter rolls. While Virginia might have a few names of dead people on its voter registration lists, it is unlikely to have many, because local registrars regularly receive reports from the state health department with the names of Virginians who have recently died. These names are checked against the voter rolls and then removed.

A problem in the Pew report that has been discussed with less frequency is that there are people who are registered to vote in two or more states. This is a result, the report explains, of Americans’ mobility and their belief that, when they register to vote in their new state, their old state removes them from the voter rolls.

In fact, this only happens if the new state informs the old state. Again, Virginia’s procedures are set up so that, if a local registrar learns that a former voter has moved to another state, the new state is told about it. What the new state does with the information is up to its own standard operating procedure.

Although the report suggests that it would be possible to fix this problem through some kind of national voter registration list — a proposal that brings with it additional constitutional and legal issues that can be addressed some other time — what the Times article does not note is that this problem of multiple registrations can be traced directly to earlier federal interference in state election laws: namely, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, more commonly known as the “Motor Voter Law.”

Most people are familiar with the aspect of this law that mandates that various agencies that serve the public, such as a Department of Motor Vehicles (hence “Motor Voter”), should make available voter registration applications. The idea was to make it easier for new residents of a state or locality to register to vote.

What few people know, outside the elections profession, is that Motor Voter also ended the long-standing practice in the states of purging voter rolls of inactive voters. Prior to Motor Voter, local registrars could remove names of people from voter registration lists if those persons had not voted within a certain time — for example, not within the last three federal election cycles.

The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 ended that practice. Virtually the only reasons that a state or local voter registration agency can now remove a voter from the rolls are if that person requests it or if the registrar receives proof that the individual is deceased.

Any blame for the “disarray” that so perturbs the Pew Center and others can be placed squarely at the feet of Congress and the Clinton Administration. If the federal law were amended to permit a wider array of “purges,” the problem of multiple registrations could be fixed quickly and legally. On the other hand, another federal law, on top of Motor Voter and the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA), will not diminish these problems. It can only exacerbate them.

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