Lawsuit:Off-kilter voters lists scrutinized

The U.S. Justice Department, in a lawsuit filed Tuesday against the state of Missouri, says 29 Missouri counties had more registered voters last November than they did voting-age residents.

The lawsuit claims the state is violating a federal law that requires reasonable efforts to remove ineligible voters from the rolls. The state assigns that duty to 116 local election jurisdictions, some of which are making a shoddy and inconsistent effort, the lawsuit claims.

After comparing census numbers with registered voters, the Secretary of State’s office identified Boone County as one of those counties, although the lawsuit does not name Boone County.

The situation exists because of federal law, Boone County Clerk Wendy Noren said. Although the county had more registered voters than voting populace in the 2004 election, Noren said she is bound by the National Voters Registration Act to keep registered voters on her list for two federal election cycles before removing them. She said that once a person is flagged as having moved, her office must send two notices by mail before the timetable to remove them can start.

“I had 20,000 voters last November that we identified that were not at a current address,” Noren said. “We notified them twice, and they did not respond. Therefore, they had to remain on the list. After Dec. 15, I took over 12,000 (voters) off the file.”

Noren said that if the number of registered voters is higher than the voting-age population in college towns, where the population is in flux, it is likely they are complying with federal voter registration laws. She said she understands that the Justice Department would begin to investigate jurisdictions where there are discrepancies.

The lawsuit, Noren said, “is about counties that have never done list maintenance” of voter registrations. “I am doing list-maintenance activities all the time,” she said.

The lawsuit, she said, alleges that some counties don’t even try to take people off lists or are not doing two mailings.

Secretary of State Robin Carnahan said she inherited the problem from former Secretary of State Matt Blunt, who now is governor. But she said state law does not allow the secretary of state’s office to clean up voter rolls.

“We have no enforcement authority or statutory authority to take names off the voter list. That’s something counties are responsible for doing,” Carnahan said.

Carnahan said a centralized voter registration database expected to be running by January should help eliminate incorrect voter registrations.

Blunt spokesman Spence Jackson cited the same solution, with a twist. “The fact is the governor got the process started on creation of a centralized voter registration database” when he was secretary of state, Jackson said.

That database is part of the Help America Vote Act that passed in 2002 after the 2000 presidential election. Missouri has since received $63 million to comply with the act’s requirements, such as the centralized database, said Carnahan spokesman Mike Seitz. The database will track registered voters in a comprehensive list accessible by election officials in all Missouri counties.

“This will help detect if people are registered in more than one jurisdiction. If someone moves to a different county, (the database) will make it easier to check for duplicates,” Seitz said.

Noren said that the uniform database will actually hurt her by making her wait every two years to do mailings. She would also no longer be able to mail sample ballots, a service she said exceeds state requirements.

Carnahan released a letter Tuesday night to the Justice Department outlining an eight-part plan that includes the creation of a procedural manual and training for county election officials on how to maintain voter roles.

The plan also says Carnahan’s office will develop a method next year of tracking how well county officials are maintaining their voter lists and will study the feasibility of matching voter registration lists against the Social Security Administration’s death list and the U.S. Postal Service’s change-of-address files.

The Justice Department said it sued after notifying the state of its concerns in March and again in October.

Carnahan said her staff and the Attorney General’s Office have been talking for weeks with the Justice Department about steps to help counties better maintain voter rolls.

The Justice Department wanted the state to enter into a formal consent decree to enforce the state’s corrective actions, but Attorney General Jay Nixon was unwilling to do that, Carnahan said.

“I strongly believe that a costly lawsuit over this matter is unnecessary, unjustified and unwise,” Carnahan said.

Without naming specific election officials, the Justice Department lawsuit claims that one county clerk has never performed a systematic canvass of the county’s voters and another has not removed dead voters and duplicate registrations. Another clerk acknowledged not removing voters who were registered under both maiden and married names, nor voters who were registered in multiple counties, the lawsuit said.

Yet another county clerk failed to flag voters who may have moved as “inactive” or provide them notice to confirm their residence, the lawsuit said. Instead, after sending a letter to each voter who had not cast a ballot in four years, the clerk immediately removed them from the rolls. The high mark was in Reynolds County, where voter rolls were at 151 percent of the county’s 2004 census for voting-age population.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.