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Voter List Maintenance
By Cameron Sweeney, O’Connor Scholar
Having accurate and up-to-date voter registration lists is crucial to running elections in the United States, and with the ever-changing status of voters across the country, doing so is no easy task. More than 40 million Americans change their addresses every year. People move, become eligible to vote or lose their voting eligibility every day. With every change that occurs, election officials seek to keep their voter rolls up to date. Accurate voter rolls help reduce voting lines, decrease the number of provisional ballots cast and help ensure that only eligible electors can cast a ballot. The process of updating voter rolls is known as voter list maintenance, two major pieces of federal legislation, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 and the Help America Vote Act of 2002, set the regulatory framework for how this system works.
Federal Legislation and Voter List Maintenance
The National Voter Registration Act, or NVRA, limits when list maintenance verification activities can happen and specifies the reasons a state may remove a voter from the roles. Some reasons for removal include a felony conviction, mental incapacity, the voter’s request or because a voter no longer lives in the jurisdiction. The NVRA prohibited states from removing a voter from the registration rolls solely for failing to vote in an election. The law broaden opportunities for voter registration, requiring states to offer voter registration at driver’s license bureaus and other state agencies.
The Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, requires states to develop a digitized list for voter registration and coordinate with correctional and other state departments to maintain that list. HAVA also modified the NVRA, allowing states to remove voters who fail to vote in two consecutive general elections for federal office (this equates to approximately 4 years) and those who fail to respond to an address confirmation mailer.
Together, these two pieces of legislation only offer a framework for states, which gives them freedom to govern the voter list maintenance process. As a result, many nuances and difficulties arise as election officials update their voter rolls, especially when people move within a state and when states allow for same-day registration.
Voter List Maintenance Procedures Across the States
In states with same-day registration, such as Idaho, Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Wyoming, voter rolls are actively changing as elections are being held. In other states, such as Indiana, Missouri and Virginia, citizens are allowed to register and vote at a new precinct on election day when they move residences within a state so long as they’re already registered to vote in that state. In states where registration is continuously updated, it can be near impossible to maintain a completely accurate voter roll. According to Remi Garza, the elections administrator of Cameron County, Texas, voter list maintenance is crucial and constant.
“Voter list maintenance is extremely important and is a perpetual process,” said Garza. “The belief that it can ever be finished is false. As soon as election officials update the rolls, someone has moved, someone has died, or someone new registers to vote.”
States differ in their approach to removing voters from rolls due to inactivity. While in most states, a lack of voting-related activity does not trigger removal from the rolls, this is not universal. In Idaho, Minnesota and New Hampshire, among others, the removal process is automatically triggered after four years of inactivity. In Wyoming, the removal process starts after failing to vote in just one general election. For most of these states, a non-voter is sent a mailer to confirm their intention to remain an active voter. Failure to respond to this notice may cause their voter registration to be purged.
While some states share similarities, the process of voter list maintenance varies widely from state to state, as does the entity in charge of voter list maintenance s. Some states only authorize local election officials to add and remove names from voter lists, while others solely rely upon state-level officials. Several states utilize a mix of both local and state-level officials. According to the Election Administration and Voting Survey, 35 states, including California, Missouri, Nevada and New Mexico, only authorize local election officials to add and remove names from voter lists. In Alaska, Georgia Massachusetts and other states, voter list maintenance is conducted solely at the state level. Hybrid systems are used in 13 states, including Arizona, Florida, Idaho and Maine.
Inter-State Cooperation
Lack of information sharing across states can further complicate voter list maintenance procedures. States do not automatically share or cross-check voter registration information with one another, and no federal legislation requires interstate cooperation. Election Registration Information Center (ERIC) is a nonprofit made up of 24 states and the District of Columbia aimed at addressing this gap by allowing states to compare voter list data, data on address changes and death records to help keep voter rolls more accurate and up to date. Many states also utilize the U.S. Postal Service’s National Change of Address data and death records from the Social Security Administration to maintain voter lists.
When it comes to removing the deceased from voter rolls, tracking felony convictions (which disqualifies a person from voting in some states), identifying potential noncitizens for voter registration list maintenance and tracking interstate address changes, each state has a different approach and methodology for trying to keep up with the constantly changing status of voters across the country. While these differing approaches can spur fierce debates, voter list maintenance remains a crucial role in the running of secure and efficient elections.