Voting Lists and Mail Ballots

There’s nothing good about the latest retreat by the Supreme Court on voting rights as they temporarily allowed the Trump administration to move forward to use the postal service to somehow police and restrict mail ballot delivery for the coming midterm election. It doesn’t take much imagination to envision the chaos since one-third of US voters now mail their ballots. 

New and existing suits may derail these anti-democratic efforts. A whistleblower report indicates that in trying to obey Trump’s executive order, the postal service is working on a program that would foul an entire batch of mail ballots, numbering in the hundreds or thousands, if one ballot comes up without a match to the list. This is disenfranchisement at an entirely new level.

The mail is in the news, but the real problem starts and ends with the voter lists. As many realize, the lists have been a contentious issue for quite some time already. Election matters under the US Constitution are generally handled by the states. Each state keeps and maintains a list of voters. Trump, over the last year, has been on a mission to usurp the states and federalize the lists. He has sought to create one master national list of voters by demanding that every state turn over the list to Homeland Security. The thin rationale for doing so is his claim that there is significant non-citizen voting, which has been roundly disproven with findings that any unqualified voting is infinitesimal. Some states complied, but many states refused, some even going to court to stop the effort. Many states argue, correctly, that these lists hold private, protected information on their citizens, and it should be kept that way. There is also of course no trust that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would secure any voter list appropriately or not manipulate the data for different purposes.

Almost all parties that have looked at the DHS list process today agree that they are a hot mess rife with errors. ACORN’s Voter Purge Project knows quite a bit about this problem. Working with others over the last ten years, we acquired lists that were freely available on state websites (Ohio, Florida, etc) or that we acquired at nominal prices (California, Wyoming, Colorado, etc). We processed the lists to determine whether states were correctly purging voters who were dead or moved. We regularly found errors. Some were simple, as anyone might expect, under the “law of errors” when you are handling millions of records. Duplicate and common names cause problems like Smith, Johnson, Garcia, and so forth. 

At other times the glitches were severe in Florida and Iowa and in Ohio when a correct list in the counties populated by Columbus and Cleveland had not been uploaded to the state system. An effort, spearheaded by Kansas’ Kris Kobach, which claimed to find purges for many states was found faulty in practice, and his effort under Trump 1.0 to expand the system collapsed because of partisanship and ineptness. Having DHS rapidly acquire and aggregate voter lists from the states, which all have their separate systems and software, is going to be a classic case of “garbage in, garbage out.”

In short, denying delivery of mail ballots by the post office to states that in good faith and for good reason have refused to surrender their constitutional authority to the federal government is a righteous claim and is just plain wrong. Blocking any delivery of mail ballots in order to force states to surrender their lists is just gangsterism by another name. Taking away people’s vote is different than bullying a ballroom out of the ground. Using a higgly piggly list that’s a Swiss cheese of errors to throw out ballots is unconscionable. 

The answer to what could go wrong is simple: everything!

Wade Rathke is the founder and Chief Organizer of ACORN International as well as Local 100 United Labor Unions and the Publisher of Social Policy magazine. Wade is also the founder, and served as the Chief Organizer of ACORN for since 1970.