Common Sense Reforms For Dirty Voter Rolls.

Every U.S. state has election rolls of registered voters.  Those rolls, under Federal law, must be maintained and cleaned regularly.  Effective cleaning is not being done. Visibility, with appropriate protection for certain identities, (battered individuals, judges, etc.) insures confidence in voter rolls and thus honest elections.

The following enumerate the Minimum Viable Reforms  – the minimum requirement that current technology enables. 

Most states can implement these reforms in 60 days or less, for less than $600,000 per year.

Every item on this list is available today, at a modest cost, and can be brought into production swiftly, with modern computer technology.

Common Sense Reforms For Dirty Voter Rolls.

  • 1

    Voter registration rolls should be reconciled, every 30 days, with county personal property tax rolls ensuring every address at which a registered voter resides is valid.

  • 2

    Voter registration rolls should be snapshotted, by date, at least monthly.  Every voter roll snapshot is compared with every previous snapshot and the differences preserved in a readable file for public review – with graphical and tabular representations.

  • 3

    Every voter address should be scanned by an artificial intelligence (AI) engine to take the same address, if presented in multiple ways, and bring it into a uniform address type.

  • 4

    Beginning 45 days before early voting, every state should begin daily snapshots of the voter rolls.  These comparisons identify new voters added after deadlines, zip code changes or other election commission changes that inject uncertainty and doubt into election outcomes.

  • 5

    Every state must add any new voters at the end of their voter ID number sequencing.  If any voters are added within current voter ID numbering sequences, these are flagged and reported.

  • 6

    Available state databases should be reconciled against the state’s voter rolls.  DMV, death records, NCOA change of address records, lists of non-citizens and any other information the state captures should be available to reconcile against the voter rolls to insure consistency in real time, constantly.

  • 7

    The system should be able to be run as an outside service (SaaS), or as a state-run service within the state’s IT infrastructure, in a cloud (someone else’s data center) as the state mandates – inexpensively, implemented in 60 days or less, costing no more than $600,000 per year for most states.

  • 8

    The state should identify any inserted characters, hidden characters or strings in voter registration numbers rendering them difficult for citizens to process on current computers.  Such control characters and strings should be removed and if not possible – identified.

  • 9

    The state system should operate real time with queries, sorts or other data manipulation happening in less than 10 seconds, across all databases visible from a mobile device.

  • 10

    During early voting, the state system should receive daily updates of who voted (electronic pollbook) and compare each day’s data with all previous day’s data – insuring cast ballot information is never modified.

  • 11

    The state should identify, constantly, the state’s undeliverable ballot locations.  This is the list of voter addresses to which the election commission will mail a ballot, but such a ballot will be undeliverable.

  • 12

    Every state’s voter rolls should be available for citizen review, at a reasonable cost, and in a format not hindering the use of common computer tools.

  • 13

    Every state runs a temporal analysis with reasonable, enforced time limits.  For instance, a college student voting from a dorm room for 8 years, a homeless person voting from a shelter for 12 years, persons voting from hotels for a decade – should be flagged and checked for accuracy.

  • 14

    Every state’s voter rolls should be accessible from a system which checks such things as valid birthdate (not 1804), valid address (not vacant lot), correct city and zip code and other preventative anomaly checks in real time when a voter is registering.

  • 15

    Every state should make this system available to all county or entity registrars at little or no additional cost.