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Officials run to keep up voter list

Duplicate registrations are common occurrence
Parker

Every morning, Tiffany Lee Parker scans the obituaries in The Durango Herald, not out of morbid curiosity but in search of someone who will no longer vote.

The routine is one way that Parker, who is La Plata County’s election official, maintains as accurate a list as possible of registered voters.

It’s not easy, Parker says, citing:

People die, and people move away.

Women marry and take the husband’s last name.

When people are put in prison or put on parole, they must be stricken from the rolls.

Hyphenated names cause problems.

Then there are newcomers who don’t register to vote until an election is right around the corner.

Often, new arrivals register to vote in La Plata County without removing themselves from the rolls from their previous Colorado county or state, Parker said.

Therein lies a problem that bedevils election officials across the country: duplicate voter registrations.

Watchdog.org, a nonprofit website that tracks state and local governments, recently reported that the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck program found 6.9 million duplicate voter registrations based on first and last names and date of birth.

The statistics cover only the 28 states that share voter registration numbers through Crosscheck. The list includes Colorado but not the three most populous states: California, Texas and Florida. Crosscheck began in 2005 with Kansas, Iowa, Missouri and Nebraska.

According to 2014 Crosscheck statistics, in Colorado, there are a potential 729 duplicate registrations based on first and last names and date of birth.

This number roughly is .02 percent of the 3,574,109 registered voters on state rolls.

Crosscheck figures further indicate that among the 101,731,161 registered voters in the 28 states, Colorado has 300,842 potential matches somewhere judging by first and last name and date of birth.

In this case, the Colorado number of potential duplicates is almost .03 percent of total voters in the 28 states.

In reality, Parker said, in her 18 years in the clerk and recorder’s office, she has found only one person who voted twice.

The double-dipper, who voted in La Plata County and in Arizona in the 2012 presidential election, was tripped up through the Crosscheck program, Parker said.

“I turned the matter over to the Secretary of State’s Office, and from there it went to the attorney general,” Parker said. “I don’t know what the outcome was.”

Gerry Cummins, vice president for voter services at the Colorado League Women Voters, didn’t seem surprised by the number of duplicate registrations.

“The number of duplicates could be low, given the mobility of society,” Cummins said. “When people move, I imagine the last thing on their mind is canceling their voter registration.”

A number of safeguards help election officials manage voter registration, Cummins said. She cited the Colorado Voter Access & Modernized Elections Act.

The legislation approved in 2013 that strengthened people’s participation in the election process also helped election officials.

The act mandated ballots be sent to all active voters. It also mandated mail-in elections; election-day registration; use of U.S. Postal Service change-of-address forms to cancel a voter registration; and repealed the need for election officials to move people to inactive status if they failed to vote.

Parker must wait for two general elections before she can remove a name from the inactive rolls.

Parker uses all possible sources to weed out duplicate registrations.

One is the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a data-matching exchange for election officials. It was established with a heavy investment by The Pew Charitable Trusts.

ERIC is not an official record, but a tool to help states crosscheck voter registrations. It’s up to each state to use ERIC information, sent to states once a quarter, as it sees fit.

Parker exchanges notices of canceled voter registrations with other states.

“Pew says that one in eight voter registrations contains inaccuracies,” Parker said.

Ouray County is an example of uncertain numbers, Parker said. The county has more registered voters than the number of voter-age people found by the Bureau of the Census.

In 2014, there were 10,396 names on the inactive voter rolls in La Plata County. There were 31,482 active voters.

Parker has found that controversial issues tend to awaken dormant voters. Durango residents who had never voted registered ahead of the 2013 election on whether Albertsons, the two City Market stores and Walmart could charge customers for take-out plastic bags.

She also scans the Pine River Times obituaries and once a month gets a report from the secretary of state on deaths in Colorado. The same office sends her a monthly report on incarcerations and parole sentences.

Through the U.S. Postal Service, Parker once a month receives change-of-address records. She mails the person named, asking where he or she wants to claim as a voter address.

daler@durangoherald.com



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