You can’t run a clean
election
— especially with mail voting — when people are registered to vote more than once. All across America, some people are receiving multiple ballots because they are registered multiple times. This can happen far easier than you think. Unfortunately, some states are failing to do anything about the problem of duplicate registrations.
Duplicate registrations aren’t always some sinister voter fraud plot. They can happen when a person is registered under variations of their name. For example, John Smith is registered to vote under the name John Smith at the DMV and John J. Smith when they fill out a voter registration form at a fair. Another common example is a woman who is registered to vote under her maiden name and her married name.
FOUR REASONS THE NEW REPUBLICAN-CONTROLLED HOUSE IS ALREADY IN DISARRAY
The Public Interest Legal Foundation, of which I am president, has enjoyed real successes in forcing election officials to clean up voter rolls, including in Pennsylvania, Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and Mississippi. Our latest success was in Minnesota. We found that just six counties in Minnesota contained 510 apparent duplicate registrations. Don’t think 510 votes can’t affect the outcome of an election. Ask former Sen. Norm Coleman. His state Senate race in Minnesota was decided by 225 votes. Every single vote matters.
Many people claim that duplicate registrations can’t happen, and if they do, it’s a rarity. Our litigation in Minnesota demonstrated that duplicate registrations happen far more often than people think. Duplicate registrations matter because it provides the opportunity for people to vote twice, especially in states where mail ballots are automatically sent to every registrant. It also wastes taxpayer money as well as anyone who uses voter rolls to mail materials to addresses.
Under federal law, specifically, the Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, states are required to implement a computerized statewide voter registration list that eliminates duplicate registrations. Through the Foundation’s HAVA complaints, so far, five Minnesota counties have removed 440 duplicate voter registrations and put into place more thorough systems to check for them. One Minnesota county is still fighting the implementation of better processes to find and eliminate duplicates. One wonders why they would oppose having accurate rolls.
Through the litigation process, we have learned many lessons of errors that can happen in county election offices. We learned election officials sometimes cause duplicate registrations themselves. One person we identified as a duplicate registrant was actually two separate people living in the same house. One person living in the house changed her name to Nicklelodeus Thunder McLoud. But when she updated her voter registration, the election office mistakenly changed both her name and her housemate’s name to the new name. Essentially, one voter registration now had the wrong name listed.
Another lesson that was reinforced is that voter history data around the country are not always accurate. This is important because so many claims in 2020 were based on bad voter history files. Often, poll workers or other election officials assign a ballot cast entry to the wrong registrant. It isn’t just Minnesota. In a report released in 2020, the Foundation found
nearly 38,000 duplicate registrants
on America’s voter rolls. We even found a man in Pennsylvania registered seven times. You read that right — seven times. In New Jersey, we found a person registered six times. These states have a systematic failure in identifying and removing duplicate registrations.
We can all agree that no one should be registered twice. Not only does removing duplicate registrations make elections more secure, but it is required by federal law. Election officials need to do their job and ensure that all voters are only registered once. We should not have to take legal action to get election officials to do their jobs like we did in Minnesota.
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J. Christian Adams is the president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a former Justice Department attorney, and current commissioner on the United States Commission for Civil Rights.
