Colorado and Nevada officials responded on Thursday to Wednesday's New York Times story alleging thousands of voters have been removed from voter rolls or blocked from registering in violation of federal law. The article attributed the illegal actions to local officials making mistakes complying with the 2002 Help America Vote Act and did not accuse anyone of deliberately breaking the law.
Among the provisions of the 2002 law, 90 days before an election people are only allowed to be removed from voting rolls if they die, move out of state, or are declared unfit to vote. Officials are supposed to compare registrations against state records such as drivers' licences, and only use the Social Security Administration database as a last resort. Questionable figures seem to suggest Colorado illegally purged people for invalid reasons and Nevada over-relied on the Social Security database, according to the original Times article.
In Colorado, some 37,000 people were removed from the rolls in the three weeks after July 21. During that time, about 5,100 people moved out of the state and about 2,400 died, according to postal data and death records...Election officials in Nevada, for example, used the Social Security database more than 740,000 times to check voter files or registration applications and found more than 715,000 non-matches, federal records show.
"I have no idea where they got the numbers from," Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman said in a press conference.
Coffman's office provided data showing 14,049 voter registrations had been purged since July 21, including 6,572 voters who moved out of the county or state, 4,434 duplicate registrations, and 1,145 voters who had died. He said his office will review some duplicate registrations that may have been removed from the rolls in violation of the 90-day-window provision of the law and correct erroneous information given to some purged voters about how to correct their information.
"I'm very concerned by a level of hysteria that seems to be rising as a result of the New York Times article," Pat Waak, chairwomen of the Colorado Democratic Party, told the Denver Post. "That article was not helpful to the state of Colorado."
Nevada Secretary of State Ross Miller called the story misleading. "I want to assure Nevadans that any suggestion that eligible voters will be denied their right to participate in this election on Nov. 4 is false," he said in a statement.
Matt Griffin, elections deputy for the Secretary of State's office, explained that people sometimes make mistakes filling out their registration forms such as writing their social security number in the driver's license field which can require accessing the Social Security Administration database for comparison and causes their file to be flagged. Even so, he told the Nevada Appeal, "all you've got to do is show an ID and you can still vote."
In an editorial siding with Coffman's take on the figures, the Rocky Mountain News calls out the Gray Lady for stoking distrust of the electoral process:
Let's hope The New York Times' reporting on voter registration is more accurate in other states than Republican Secretary of State Mike Coffman and state Democratic Party Chairman Pat Waak say it was about Colorado. Otherwise, the Times may fuel unwarranted fears about the integrity of the November election...Without that confidence, Americans may lose trust in the ability of officials to conduct honest elections.
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Read the rest of the Battle For The West Daily Digest here.