Pew Study: 1 in 8 Voter Records Flawed - USATODAY.com
This is why close elections are essentially a coin flip
WASHINGTON - More than 24 million voter-registration records in the United States— about one in eight — are inaccurate, out-of-date or duplicates. Nearly 2.8 million people are registered in two or more states, and perhaps 1.8 million registered voters are dead.”We have a ramshackle registration system in the U.S. It’s a mess. It’s expensive. There isn’t central control over the process,” said Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.
The problem is particularly bad in swing states, where parties, campaigns and others canvass the state registering voters, even if they’re already registered, and often collecting inaccurate information, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted said. “Everybody’s registering you here,” he said. “We don’t really have control of that.”
Husted is asking the U.S. Justice Department for guidance on how to clean up the rolls before the presidential election without violating motor voter. “It undermines voter confidence and creates the potential for voter fraud where people could act and vote on their behalf,” he said.
Pew’s solution: create a multistate data center to give officials voter registrations, motor vehicle records and death certificates from other states, allowing them to spot records that could be removed. That effort is starting this year with Colorado, Delaware, Maryland, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Virginia and Washington.