Voting systems throughout the United States are vulnerable to corruption in a variety of ways, and the federal government has an obligation to protect the integrity of the electoral process. At a recent meeting of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s Committee on the Future of Voting, the Department of Homeland Security’s Robert Kolasky put it bluntly: “It’s not a fair fight to pit Orange County (California) against the Russians.” While the intelligence community has not confirmed that the hackers working on behalf of the Russian government to undermine the 2016 election were successful at tampering with actual vote tallies, they certainly succeeded at shaking our confidence in the electoral process, which over time could undermine faith in democracy. The management of statewide eligible voter lists is a particularly challenging but crucial responsibility. On the one hand, data entry errors, duplicate records and “live” records for deceased voters invite voter fraud and inaccuracies in voting data. On the other hand, overly broad purging of voter lists can result in the exclusion of eligible voters from the rolls.
… For securing and maintaining precise voter list data from the start, the implementation of automatic voter registration, or AVR, is proving increasingly effective and popular. By automatically registering all eligible adults (unless they decline) when people update their own data through government agencies, and by transferring that data electronically on a regular basis, the process “boosts registration rates, cleans up the rolls, makes voting more convenient, and reduces the potential for voter fraud, all while lowering costs” according to the Brennan Center for Justice, which advocates AVR.
Ten states and the District of Columbia have already approved AVR, and 32 states have introduced AVR proposals this year. It is a politically bi-partisan solution, with states as different as California and Alaska having already adopted the practice.
Road Island’s Democratic Secretary of State, Nellie Gorbea, has stated that “Having clean voter lists is critical to preserving the integrity of our elections, which is why I made enacting Automatic Voter Registration a priority.”
Full Article: Voting Technology Needs an Upgrade: Here’s What Congress Can Do – Union of Concerned Scientists.