On Capitol Hill Wednesday, lawmakers held a hearing to evaluate how states maintain accurate and up-to-date voter registration rolls.
Chairman of the House Administration Committee Rep. Gregg Harper, R-Miss., said it is paramount for elections to be conducted in a fair and open manner. “Ensuring the accuracy of voter registration lists is the foundation to a successful election. Having accurate lists increases voter confidence, it eases the administration of elections, reduces wait times, and certainly helps prevent voter fraud and irregularity,” Harper said. The hearing also questioned crosscheck programs and automatic voter registration practices. … Hearing witness and Director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union Dale Ho claimed that the interstate crosscheck program struggles with accuracy.
“With due respect to the secretary, we advise against crosscheck. A team of researchers at Stanford, Harvard, UPenn and Microsoft found misidentified, supposed double voters more than 99 percent of the time,” Ho said. The crosscheck user manual itself states “a significant number of apparent double votes are false positives.”
“There is nothing wrong with sharing information across state lines. You just have to make sure the underlying data are accurate and that you are matching protocols don’t generate false positives. And unfortunately, the crosscheck system which we hear referenced frequently, suffers from flaws in both of those regards,” Ho remarked.
Ho added that registration systems should be modernized to better account for people who move and advocated for the use of automatic voter registration.
Full Article: Lawmakers debate how states should maintain voter registration rolls | WJLA.