“Our Voter Rolls Are Cleaner Than Yours”: Balancing Access and Integrity in Voter List Maintenance

Abstract

Accurate voter lists facilitate access to the electoral process, indicate efficient voter list maintenance, and reinforce electoral integrity. Errors in voter records often result from variation in practices that are difficult to avoid given the decentralized structure of election administration in the United States. In many states, localities lack capacity to efficiently complete voter list maintenance, especially when pressured to keep “clean” voter rolls. I argue that local challenges remain when maintaining voters’ registration and voting history information, which undermines the quality of voter lists and the integrity of the electoral process. I analyze Mississippi’s Statewide Election Management System (SEMS) records and find that voter registration and voting history errors are linked to the county’s active and inactive registered voter rates and demographic characteristics. These findings confirm that local variation in voter list maintenance can impact voters depending on their voter registration status and can result in premature voter list removal.

AI and core electoral processes: Mapping the horizons

“…An up-to-date and error free voter list is critical to ensuring the integrity of elections (Merivaki 2020). Voter lists may be maintained at one of various levels of granularity namely, city/district, provincial, or national levels.…”

“…The data entry corresponding to an ex-resident sticking around in a voter list could affect electoral integrity (especially, if a false vote is cast in their name), whereas a legitimate voter being left out of the list could reduce the confidence in the electoral process. Carefully balancing access and integrity is at the core of the task of voter list maintenance (Merivaki 2020). There has been little evidence of AI usage in voter list maintenance within scholarly or gray literature.…”

“…Such a data-led approach could lead to producing myriad kinds of biases as is often observed in data-driven AI systems (Ntoutsi et al 2020). Third, there have been observations of significant local differences in voter list issues (Merivaki 2020). Such observations implicitly call for bespoke voter list maintenance techniques for specific localities to ensure effective working.…”

The racial burden of voter list maintenance errors: Evidence from Wisconsin’s supplemental movers poll books

“…For example, a registrant may have subsequently moved or died. However, there is often a difficult trade-off between voter access and electoral integrity in making “reasonable effort(s)” at list maintenance ( 3 ). Failing to remove the registration of a registrant who is ineligible to cast a ballot can reduce electoral integrity (e.g., if that registration is used to fraudulently cast a ballot), but inactivating or removing the registration of an eligible citizen can reduce confidence in the voting process, exclude voters from certain forms of official election communication, and result in disenfranchisement if a citizen is removed and does not reregister before their state’s registration deadline.…”

The Politics of Locating Polling Places: Race and Partisanship in North Carolina Election Administration, 2008–2016

“…Our definition of usability requires accurate geocoding scores in two sequential elections. The reasons for failed geocodese.g., typos in voter roll addresses-are likely unrelated to turnout decisions once we account for county administrative capacity by using fixed effects in our analysis (Merivaki 2020). In addition, even if it were somehow the case that low capacity counties had voting roll errors but more polling place manipulation of those geocode errors (an odd capacity combination), the percentage of geocode failures is small enough that it would be difficult to explain away our results.…”