Monday, August 30, 2010

Phantom Voters

This kind of stuff undermines confidence in the integrity of our elections.

State officials spent the last 16 months trying to clean up information for 777,500 people who registered to vote between January 2006 and August 2008. They have verified information for most of those people, but data still does not match for about 66,500 voters.

There are only about 6 million people in Wisconsin.  That’s a helluva a lot of “voters” who we can’t verify exist.

(5) Comments
Posted by Owen at 1954 hrs
Politics + Politics - Wisconsin

  1. I’m absolutely amazed that in a two year period we newly registered 777,500 people in Wisconsin.

    By definition we probably have one million under the age of 18 who can’t vote.  That leaves four million here.  And of that four million did we really have 20% newly register?

    This is not Florida or North Carolina or any of those other states who have a transient population.  Basically very few people are moving into this State.  And the birth rate is low.  Those who are here, have been here.  Something doesn’t add up with this massive registration number. 

    I’d love to know exactly how many newly registered voters there were in the 2006-08 period in some other similar static population states that truly have a procedure to register and don’t allow dead and non-existent people to register without ID like we do.

    Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on August 30, 2010 at 2121 hrs


  2. The computerized Statewide Voter Registration System (SVRS) came into being following the passage of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002. I suspect the 3/4 million or so “new” voters included many that were ported-over from the myriad of different local voter registration computer systems following the start up of Wisconsin’s SVRS.

    The problem we face is that the names are compared to DOT driver’s license records, and are not processed in real-time. They are batched and run against the DOT records overnight. The reason there are so many unverifiable records is because the voter application record must EXACTLY match the driver’s license recored. A missing middle initial, period in the wrong place, or missing Jr./Sr. will invalidate the record. As a municipal clerk I personally know people whose records I can’t for the life of me get validated.

    Now college voters - that’s another story. They show up in Wisconsin, vote a couple of times and head back home when they graduate. I have a suggestion (but don’t tell Jim Doyle): Let’s require a Wisconsin DL or ID in order to vote in our state!

    Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on August 31, 2010 at 0814 hrs


  3. Considering 2.18 million people voted in the last gubernatorial election (2006), the 66,500 that are unverifiable amount to 3% of the vote.  Enough to swing an election one way or another!

    Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on August 31, 2010 at 0918 hrs


  4. Given our states exceedingly simple registration process which can take place minutes prior to actual voting why not simply dump all those records which don’t match? When they come to vote then they can simply re-register.

    Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on August 31, 2010 at 1002 hrs


  5. Election officials are likely to make about 18,000 people ineligible to vote because letters to them from the state were returned as undeliverable.

    Only because ACORN has closed a number of their local offices in the past year.

    Posted by Roland Melnick on August 31, 2010 at 2217 hrs


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