Hazards of Volunteering

I woke up at four o'clock this morning and couldn't get back to sleep for worrying.

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Some years ago as a member of the Libertarian party I got a copy of the voter registration for Jackson County in digital format. Ten floppy discs. We wanted to send our fellow Libertarians, all five hundred or so, a mailing. I parsed the files into a database and printed out the mailing labels.

Then, having a little time on my hands, I started looking through the data. Just for fun, you know, see who's registered as what and so on. I discovered that my own mother-in-law was registered twice. She had just remarried and had changed her registration to her new name. But for some reason the old registration had stuck.

My wife asked her about it.

"Oh, yes, I get two ballots. I just throw one away."

So I wrote some routines to go through the data looking for other cases like hers. I found quite a few. In the worst case, I found an apartment in Ashland with something like ten registered voters, all of them with more or less the same name except for minor spelling differences. I wondered if they all voted.

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So there I was at 4:30 this morning still wondering.

Finally I got up and started googling for answers. I ran across a site called BlackBoxVoting.org that seemed fairly non-partisan. They had a "Toolkit for Election Protection." Module 10, Check Voter Registration (PDF), had just the information I needed.

Guide for Checking on Voter Registration Lists...

• Ask for a CD for the voter registration database for your county, and ask for the updates periodically. In some jurisdictions, you must be a representative of a political party to obtain this. In that case, make contact with someone who is, explain your project, and collaborate.
• Ask for the "ineligible voter list" (removed from the rolls since 2004 election)
• Ask for the list of "inactive voters" (different from ineligible)...

Here are some of the things to look for when checking voter registrations...

Most of which I'd already thought of.

So here's where the volunteering comes in. I'm a pretty good computer programmer, and I have some experience with large and dirty data sets. If someone will get me that CD, either for Jackson County or some other county in Oregon, I'll do the sleuthing, and send you the results.

I have no doubt we'll find a few "interesting" anomalies.