That part about people being booted off the rolls after only a two-year hiatus from voting is disturbing. Lots of people just want to vote for president. In addition, as this study makes clear, the trials of getting properly registered and re-registered disproportionately affect youth, African-Americans, etc, who move more often than high-income whites.
Just flawed registrar rolls could result in tens of thousands of votes disenfranchised in Ohio, according to this study.
DESCRIPTION OF THE CLEVELAND STUDY ON REGISTRATION ERRORShttp://www.caseohio.org/CaseOhio/Registration_Problems_Study.htm(my note- apparently the study was completed after the registration deadline of October 4, 2004, but before the November 2 election)A new study projects that 10,000 votes may be compromised in Cuyahoga County and some 35,000 votes statewide because of clerical and voter errors, unless we take immediate action.
Earlier this year, volunteers for the Greater Cleveland Voter Registration Coalition began hearing from some citizens that they had never received confirmation of registration from the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections. Fortunately, the Coalition had copied every single registration form before they handed them in to the Board of Elections. Two preliminary follow-up studies on 275 registrations confirmed that there was indeed a problem. The next step was to compare nearly 2500 submitted registrations to those listed as “active” voters on the Board of Election rolls. The initial result was that about 13% were not found on the rolls, 6 weeks or more after submission. The Board next kindly gave us access to the detailed records on these registrations, which revealed that about half of the 13% had been legitimately deleted because of death, voter moving out of county, imprisonment for felony after registration, lack of citizenship, duplication, etc. Other supposedly missing registrations arrived later on the rolls after the Board caught up with its backlog, even though they had been submitted months before.
We next traced the fate of the remaining problem submissions and found that that over 5% of the nearly 2500 registrations were not on the rolls at all, incorrectly entered, not updated for address change, or suffered from voter errors (See detail below.). In most of these cases, the voter would have no way of knowing they were not registered or were registered with errors until election day, unless they happened to check with the Board of Elections. Also, after subtraction for duplicate registration forms and registrations legitimately cancelled, the final number analyzed was closer to 2200 (see below).
By knowing that at least 5% of voters might have their votes compromised, and that the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections had received about 200,000 applications, we computed that about 10,000 votes in Cuyahoga County would be compromised. To determine the statewide numbers of received registrations, in early September, we called larger county Boards of Election to ask for their numbers of new 2004 registrations/change-of-addresses, until we had numbers from Boards that collectively handle 48% of Ohio's 2002 registered voters. From those total numbers, we projected that about 760,000 new cards had been submitted statewide since January 1, 2004. Since some of these would be later legitimately disqualified (deceased, moved out of county, imprisoned, duplications, etc), we estimated that 5% of 700,000 or 35,000 votes statewide would be compromised if the results found in Cuyahoga County apply to registrations statewide.
Details of Study: (see link)
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