FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

December 3, 2009

Contact:      
Jan BenDor, State Coordinator, 734-484-1744, [email protected]
Phil Shepard, Report Editor, 517-332-0761, [email protected]

The complete report is available at: http://www.MichiganElectionReformAlliance.Org/2006MIVoterPurge.pdf

Michigan Election Reform Alliance Reports Investigation of State Voter Purge

 A recently completed state program to cancel Michigan voter registrations was flawed and may have violated state law and the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).  Unprecedented in Michigan, the program was poorly planned, mismanaged, often hidden from local clerks, mostly invisible to the media, and unaccountable to the public.

The Michigan Election Reform Alliance.Org (MERA) reached these conclusions after investigating the program for more than two years.  MERA is a nonprofit and non-partisan organization dedicated to strengthening the integrity of Michigan elections.  With the aim of purging invalid voter registrations, the program was conducted by the Michigan Bureau of Elections from July 2006 until June 2009. 

The program was the first voter list maintenance to be centrally administered in Michigan. It began when the Bureau sent more than 7 million Michigan voters a purportedly “educational” postcard.  When the U.S. Post Office returned cards and indicated a wrong address, the voters’ registrations were marked for possible cancellation.  “By using ‘educational’ postcards, the Bureau effectively masked the fact that the postcards were part of a voter list purge,” concluded the report.

MERA’s investigation revealed that the state program was very likely a response to partisan political pressure from the Voting Rights Section of the Bush administration’s Department of Justice. The MERA report concludes that “under pressure from the Department of Justice, Michigan’s state-level election officials chose by mounting the program to participate in a partisan attempt to manipulate the election system with minimal regard for voters’ rights or the responsibilities of local clerks.”

In the end, the program was expensive, with limited effectiveness and a significant error rate.  The $2 million cost was ten times higher per tagged record than previous efforts conducted in targeted jurisdictions with the cooperation of local clerks.  The program tagged 230,000 registrations for possible cancellation. 122,598 were finally cancelled in June 2009.  Of those, the report estimates that about 2,611 (2.1%) were cancelled erroneously.  The program’s cost was $16.31 per tagged record, as compared to $1.58 per tagged record in the earlier targeted approach.

The program conformed to NVRA requirements to give voters notice and observe a grace period before finally cancelling registrations.  But it failed to treat voters uniformly and it did not keep adequate records.  Both are required by the NVRA.  The program also flaunted Michigan laws that give local clerks responsibility for voter list maintenance.

The report makes several recommendations.

To avoid costly purges, the report suggests a “dynamic” registration process that ties voter records to other governmental record-keeping activities.  Voter registrations would be automatically added or updated when other milestones in life are reached, such as high school and college registration, employment changes, auto and driver’s license renewals, registration for health care, or death certificates.

To improve government accountability, the Michigan Secretary of State should:

    * Publish pertinent policies on voter list maintenance
    * Educate voters on  keeping their registration current
    * Announce all major list maintenance programs in advance and publish detailed results after completion
    * Provide a database with multilingual instructions for voters to check for errors and correct them

Although it is unknown whether any election outcomes were affected by the state program, the investigation shows that Michigan’s election system is vulnerable to partisan manipulation.  “The primary importance of the Michigan program,” the report concludes, “lies not in the very modest improvement in list accuracy that it may have accomplished, but rather in the examples it presents of what not to do and what practices to avoid . . . , if voting rights are to be respected and honored.”

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