Regular scrubbing of voter rolls would ease ‘fraud’ concerns

ON several occasions since winning the election, President Trump has claimed that millions of votes were cast illegally in the 2016 election. He cites no reliable evidence. Numerous studies have found organized voter fraud rare.

Trump seems to conflate voter fraud with voter registration fraud. They are different things. Voting is a two-step process. First, one registers to vote, then one casts a ballot. The first step needs reform to ensure the integrity of the second.

People often register through voter registration drives organized by groups that pay their employees per sign-up. This creates an incentivize for those employees to fill out fraudulent registrations.

A 2012 Pew Research Center study found that roughly one in eight voter registrations is out of date, inaccurate or a duplicate. That’s 24 million people. This includes 1.8 million people who are dead and nearly 3 million who are registered in more than one state.

People move and change their names. Often they don’t notify their state’s voter registrars when they do. When people die, their names may stay on voter rolls if their families say nothing, as many do.

But that doesn’t mean millions of people are casting illegal ballots, especially as doing so is a felony punishable by jail time. Most of those people registered in two places probably don’t even realize it. Almost nobody attempts to vote twice.

Still, the potential for abuse is real so long as millions of ineligible voters remain on the rolls.

States must periodically purge their rolls while making sure that legitimate voters aren’t eliminated. The left responds predictably to any reform effort with allegations of voter suppression and discrimination against minority voters.

Trump has said he will launch a “major investigation” into voter fraud even though his own lawyers say the election was “not tainted.” Federal law requires that states clean their rolls, but the law wasn’t enforced under President Barack Obama. The Justice Department didn’t comply with states that wanted to check state voter registration records against federal records. We trust this will no longer be the case under Trump. The administration should sue states that refuse to clean their rolls.

An innovative approach would have states adopt the Electronic Registration Information Center, which uses information from motor vehicle departments, Social Security Administration records and other databases to compare voters across states. It’s a streamlined process of verifying voter eligibility less expensive and more accurate than previous systems.

Polling has found that one in four voters believes Trump’s allegations about voter fraud. Many people seem also to buy the liberal smear that efforts to reform the broken system are Jim Crow-type efforts to exclude racial minorities from the democratic process.

Voting is a constitutional right. But it is also a trust between the public and those they elect to lead them. That trust is frayed at the moment, but states can help repair the fabric of our polity by scrubbing their voter rolls.