But governments sure like to think of them that way. Once they have a database built, no matter how many problems they have, the data is considered sacred, and making any sorts of changes or corrections becomes nigh-impossible.
Wired has a fascinating (and scary) article about the increasing use of voter registration databases, as mandated in 2002 by the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA). As someone who, professionally, works with database design and usage extensively, let me tell you that they’re hitting pretty much every error in the book, including multiple ID schemas (Drivers License, SSN tails, state-generated IDs), lack of data validation (people don’t get any feedback of how they are in the system until they show up at the polling place and are told that they are the wrong party, gender, or address), deletion of voters from the rolls based on dubious comparisons between questionable databases in different states, lack of testing, troubled system development processes and changes in contractors, lack of access control and auditing …
… and, of course, rolling forward with this for a major national election.
But election experts say the real concern is how states are conducting database matches of new voters under HAVA.
The law requires each voter to have a unique identifier. Since 2004, new registration applicants have had to provide a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number to register (voters who don’t have them are assigned a unique number by the state). States are required to try to authenticate the numbers with motor vehicle records and the Social Security Administration database.
But databases are prone to errors such as misspellings and transposed numbers, and applicants are prone to make mistakes or write illegibly on applications. The Social Security Administration has acknowledged that matches between its database and voter-registration records have yielded a 28.5 percent error rate.
Emphasis mine. So what are the consequences of being in that hapless 28.5%?
States vary in how they treat applicants whose records don’t match, and experts say rules in some states could prevent thousands of eligible voters from casting ballots or having their votes counted in November. Those who don’t match in Oregon, for example, can cast a ballot, but their vote for president or any other federal race on a ballot won’t be counted.
I.e., disenfranchisement. Your vote doesn’t count because the database screwed up. Oh, well — maybe you can vote in the next election.
Testing of how accurate the matching algorithms are — where things have been actually tested — hasn’t been promising.
Last month Wisconsin, whose database just became operational, conducted a test of 20,000 voter names against motor vehicle records and found 20 percent with mismatches, due mainly to typos and transposed numbers. Among those who failed to match were four members of the state’s Government Accountability Board (.pdf), which conducted the test. Thomas Cane, the board’s chairman and a retired judge, failed because he was listed by his full name, R. Thomas Cane, in his driver’s record.
A recent report from the Academies of Sciences noted that “many (if not most) of the matching procedures used by the states have been developed on the basis of intuitive reasoning without further systematic validation or mathematically rigorous analysis, do not reflect the state of the art in matching techniques, and have not been validated in the market, scientifically, or otherwise.”
[…] Most states will register applicants who fail a match and let them cast a regular ballot after showing ID at the polls. But three states — Iowa, Louisiana and South Dakota — won’t register applicants who fail. Iowa does, however, permit Election Day registration, which may allow a rejected applicant to reapply for registration at the poll and cast a regular ballot. Louisiana and South Dakota let the rejected applicants vote after showing ID at the poll but only on a provisional ballot, which may or may not be counted, depending on circumstances and state law. A survey of the 2004 general election showed that states varied in the percentage of provisional ballots that were cast and counted. Most states fell in the 30-70 percent range.
The assumption that the data is correct unless proven (and re-proven, and re-re-proven) otherwise is, as with any new system, and speaking professionally, absurd and dangerous. And that’s just with validation within a given state. States are beginning to compare their questionable databases to try and weed out miscreants who’ve moved but haven’t filled out all the proper paperwork.
Several states have begun comparing databases for duplicate records of existing voters, then purging voters they believe have moved and registered in another state. The problem, Slater says, is the methods used can yield false positives, and officials are deleting voters without contacting them to verify that they’ve moved, or waiting for two federal election cycles to pass, which are requirements under the National Voter Rights Acts of 1993.
In 2006, Kentucky’s attorney general successfully sued his state’s board of elections after officials compared their list to ones from South Carolina and Tennessee and purged about 8,000 voters who appeared to have registered in those states at a later date than their registration in Kentucky and were presumed to have moved.
All of this is ostensibly to prevent voter fraud, which is a laudable goal, save that there’s no evidence of any significant or widespread voter fraud going on due to people moving or using fake ID at polling places. Instead, it seems like one more way (even assuming no intent overt or covert to disenfranchise any particular group or party) for bureaucrats to build nice, neat databases of people, track what they’re doing, and kick out anyone who fails to cross their T’s or dot their I’s. Given that we’re talking about, oh, I don’t know, the most fundamental right in a democracy, one would think that they should tread a bit more carefully …
(via Pam)