Reply #34: On the Washington Law

[Ice4Clark]

SNIPS

Project Vote's continuing work to eliminate barriers to voter registration took another step forward when community organizations and advocates filed suit today challenging a 4-month old Washington law that improperly implements the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002.

The lawsuit, the product of an on-going collaboration between Project Vote and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, takes aim at a law (RCW 29A.08.107
) {b}requiring the Secretary of State to match identifying information on a voter registration application--usually a drivers' license number, state ID card number, or Social Security number--to the corresponding government database. If a match cannot be made, and an applicant doesn't correct the situation within 45 days, the applicant is not registered.

Matching records between two large databases is an inherently flawed operation for a number of reasons, including:

* human error by government election workers, including misspelling of names, omitting or adding letters in a name, and transposing numbers in a Social Security or driver's license ID.
* Asian-Americans, American Indians, and Alaska Natives with names that are especially prone to multiple English spellings, or flipping of first and last names;
* married women who have taken hyphenated names or their husbands' inconsistent punctuation of names containing apostrophes or hyphens;
* computer errors caused by file corruption from computer viruses; and absence of uniformity in maintaining, storing, and transferring computer data.

Several reliable studies have found database matching error rates of approximately 20-32%.

You can read the entire article HERE