Report: Michigan voters wrongly purged from rolls

Thousands of people may have been wrongly removed from the state’s registered voter database due to a botched list management effort undertaken by the Michigan Bureau of Elections under pressure from the Bush administration.

Between July 2006 and June 2009, state officials working under Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land conducted an unprecedented centralized and computer-assisted purge of the state’s voter database, according to the nonpartisan voting rights group the Michigan Election Reform Alliance.

According to MERA, which has released a report based on a two-year long investigation into the program, state election officials spent nearly $2 million dollars in federal funds made available under the Help America Vote Act to send non-forwarding postcards to every registered voter.

When hundreds of thousands of the post cards were returned for various reasons, some of them were scanned, and some of the associated voters were placed on an automated “cancellation countdown” that would remove them from the registered voter list if they did not vote in the 2006 and 2008 elections.

The problem, according to MERA, is that returned mail is not proof that someone is ineligible to vote: Under state and federal law, a voter’s registration is only legally subject to cancellation if the voter has moved outside the jurisdiction more than 60 days before an election.

Plus, the group argues, at some point Bureau of Elections workers stopped processing the returned postcards, so the program did not treat all voters equally, which it says is unfair and likely illegal.

The report states:

MERA estimates that of the 230,000 voters placed on cancellation countdown in 2006, about 13,497 (5.9%) had valid registrations and were placed on countdown by mistake due to inaccuracies from using returned mail as the sole basis for determining residency.

Of the 122,598 voters canceled in June 2009, MERA estimates that about 2,611 (2.1%) were canceled erroneously.

MERA calculated the error rate by checking to see how many of those flagged for possible cancellation based on returned mail actually went to the polls and voted in their registered districts in the 2006 and 2008 elections.

The group used data obtained through FOIA requests and received help from the national voting rights group the Advancement Project.

As founder of the voter list vending company Practical Political Consulting, Inc., Mark Grebner has a professional interest in state voter list management practices and followed the 2006 voter purge closely.

“I’ve skimmed [MERA's] report,” Grebner, a Democratic member of the Ingham County Commission, said in an email, “and it doesn’t seem inaccurate.”

In 2006 workers from Grebner’s company visited the facility where the Bureau of Elections stored the postcards that had been returned as undeliverable and examined the cards.

“I think they processed about 60% of the cards that came back,” he wrote, and added that he believes the state was unable to get the processing done because it relied on temporary workers “who were neither very diligent nor very fast.”

The secretary of state’s office did not respond to requests for comment on the report.

Partisan management of voter list?

The statewide voter list management program was initiated as officials in the Voting Rights Section of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department under the Bush administration pressured state election officials to do more to remove ineligible voters from the rolls.

In a March 28, 2005, letter to Land, Voting Section Chief Joseph D. Rich wrote that a Justice Department review of Michigan voter registration records “indicates that statewide there are more persons registered to vote than there were citizens of voting age under the 2000 census … this data gives rise to a concern that election officials may not be taking steps to remove ineligible voters as required by the NVRA.”

The Justice Department asked state officials to provide a status report on what steps the state would take to deal with this issue “including procedures for data matching, procedures for identifying duplicate registrations, procedures for voters who have moved or died, and procedures for identifying voters who have otherwise become ineligible.”

In a July 8, 2005, response, Bureau of Elections Chief Chris Thomas described the state’s plan to use returned mail and a centrally administered automated cancellation countdown to remove ineligible voters from the qualified voter file.

Thomas writes that the statewide voter database has been programmed to keep track of notices generated by returned mail for two federal elections.

“Through this new program, a significant portion of the ‘inactive’ voters will be sent Confirmation/Cancellation Notices,” Thomas wrote. “It is anticipated that this will lead to a sizable number of cancellations after the 2008 election.”

Thomas copied his letter to Hans von Spakovsky, counsel to the assistant attorney general — a political appointee who has become notorious for exerting partisan pressure on DOJ’s work on voting issues.

Jan BenDor, former deputy clerk in Pittsfield Township, and spokesperson for MERA said that the Justice Department had no authority to pressure Michigan on voter list management.

“There is no standard nationally that would give them the basis to criticize Michigan.”

BenDor said that partisan pressure is the simplest explanation for why the secretary of state centralized control over list management without explaining the new program to the public or even to the local clerks who are traditionally responsible for maintaining local voter rolls.

“Local clerks were not aware that this was going to happen,” she said. “Many were angry that someone from Lansing would all of a sudden take over their job and mess it up. Especially in university communities where students move frequently they work out systems of address maintenance that are very good.”

“My impressions of the whole process can be summarized thus,” said Grebner. “Incredibly evil and corrupt national operatives set it in motion, but by the time it got to Michigan, Terri Land watered it down, and Chris Thomas made sure it got diverted into harmless channels. It was a waste of $2 million, which is chump change compared to the rest of Bush’s craziness.”

In a phone interview, Bob Kengle, who served as deputy director of the Justice Department’s Voting Rights Section from 1999 to 2005, acknowledged that trimming ineligible voters from the rolls was a major policy focus for the section during the Bush years.

“This was widely seen as being a partisan inspired policy and that may be true,” he said. “I’m not sure that it was the best use of resources.”

However, he said: “If Michigan failed to have an orderly program for removing deadwood registrations then that could well be a violation of [the National Voting Rights Act].

MERA is urging action to address the problems the group identified in management of the voter list.

“For the estimated 2611 voters whose registrations were mistakenly canceled by the statewide program, each one is a citizen whose basic right to vote has been compromised by an error in voter list maintenance,” the group said.

MERA is calling on members of the state legislature and the secretary of state to appoint a panel of qualified experts to define how voter list maintenance should be carried out and communicated to the public.

Meanwhile, people can check to see whether they are registered to vote by going to the secretary of state’s online database of registered voters.