Ohio: A good start!
State to take over county voter databases
By FRITZ WENZEL
BLADE POLITICAL WRITER
COLUMBUS - County elections officials in Ohio learned yesterday they will lose control over one of their most guarded possessions - their databases of registered voters - as Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell’s office implements new federal legislation to eliminate fraud from the state’s election system.
Top aides to Mr. Blackwell briefed the elections workers meeting here about provisions of the new national law that requires counties to turn over to state officials their county lists of registered voters.
The 88 county databases will be merged into one, and then cross-checked with the state’s database of licensed drivers and other state-owned computer lists to help identify fraudulent registrations, state elections Director Pat Wolfe said.
"We know that this is something that is very sensitive for you," Dana Walch, the director of election reform, told the county officials. "We understand you are very protective of your lists. But the way we have been doing it, with 88 separate county voter registration lists, is not going to work anymore."
The topic was a key part of the agenda of the Ohio Association of Elections Officials, conducting its winter meeting at the convention center here.
The state is expected to take control of the databases by the year’s end. It will be a public record, available for purchase by telemarketers and other firms, Mr. Walch said. County officials will still be able to edit the voter database, Mr. Walch added, but they will no longer be the lone masters of its content. The provision is part of a federal election reform bill signed into law by President Bush late last year.
The legislation’s intent is to prevent a replay of the 2000 presidential election debacle in Florida, and includes nearly $4 billion in federal funding to help counties pay for new voting machines.
"Here’s one drawback. We just purchased a brand new voter-registration computer system in August of 2001, and the staff is just now getting comfortable using it," said Joe Kidd, Lucas County board of elections director. "Now, it is going to be utterly useless to us. Now we are going to have to retrain everyone on a brand new system again."
Lucas County spent $229,000 for the computer system, and pays $30,000 a year for maintenance and training expenses.
Paula Hicks-Hudson, deputy director of the Lucas County elections board, said she was concerned the state might not be able to manage the database. She pointed to the state’s mismanagement of the child-support system between 1997 and 2000, which caused $38 million to be improperly withheld from needy Ohio families, as an example of what can go wrong with a program run out of Columbus.
Lucas County’s voter database came under fire last year, as thousands of fraudulent voter registrations were submitted to the elections board as part of a petition drive to qualify a constitutional amendment for the statewide ballot. Petition circulators, paid up to $2 for a signature they gathered, submitted the fraudulent registrations in an effort to boost their pay.
http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?Date=20030124&Category=NEWS24&ArtNo=101240095&Ref=AR
Louisiana: They should work so hard to keep the long-time dead from voting!
Terminal votes should count
There is a venerable Louisiana tradition of voting the dead, those whose names adorned voting lists long after their demise, but who strangely managed to cast illegal ballots.
The law as it stands requires -- because of Louisiana's seamier electoral traditions -- that absentee votes cast by people who die before election day be disqualified.
However, there's a case for saying that the votes of the dead ought to be counted.
State Sen. Reggie Dupre, D-Montegut, wants to make a small change to allow the counting of ballots from people who cast absentee ballots in good faith and then die before Election Day, when the absentees are counted.
A constituent of Dupre's, a well-known man in the community, did that last fall. His vote was not counted.
The Terrebonne Parish clerk of court, Robert Boudreaux, and the registrar of voters, Linda Rodrigue, reported to Dupre that the late Teddy Duhe cast his ballot absentee, but died two days later. In accordance with state law, local elections officials canceled his vote.
The problem, Boudreaux and Rodrigue wrote to Dupre, is that the only reason elections officials knew Duhe had died was because he was well-known to them.
"Having over 1,000 voters for the absentee period, we feel that had this citizen been an unfamiliar name, we should not have immediately recognized that he had voted, and it is presumable that his vote would have counted," the officials said.
"The system does not identify that an absentee voter has passed away," they wrote. "We assume that, had he not been such an outstanding citizen in our community, his vote likely would have counted."
Dupre says the officials have a point. Today, the innocent dead probably do get their votes counted if local election officials don't know them personally.
Elsie Cangelosi, director of the National Voter Registration Act program for the state Elections Department, said the law is tough to enforce except in rural areas where most people are familiar with each other's names and activities.
Throwing out the votes of people who die between casting absentee ballots and election day is rare, and no one tracks how often it happens, she said.
As few and far between as these cases seem to be, why create any confusion at all by changing state law on such a picayune point?
"What if you have a terminal cancer patient who dies before the election? Why should not the last thing that person does, the last civic duty he does, count?" Dupre asks.
"If you're alive when you vote, your vote ought to count."
We can't help but think that, as rare as these cases are, the change in law will affect few people -- but those cases do seem injustices, however small. True, we doubt that the dead look down from heaven and rue that their last vote didn't count, but a modest change in election law is reasonable, particularly because local elections are sometimes decided by razor-thin margins. Changing the law would prevent cases in which officials would have to search the absentee ballots looking for dead people.
If lawmakers act on Dupre's suggestion, the bill ought to be very narrowly drawn to ensure that it does not interfere with laws needed to prevent widespread election fraud.
http://www.theadvocate.com/stories/012403/opi_edi1001.shtml