State review chops 55,000 from voter rolls

OLYMPIA – Two years after a bitterly contested governor’s race and allegations of improper voting, Washington election officials have scrubbed more than 55,000 voters from the rolls.

Among them: more than 35,000 people registered to vote in more than one place and nearly 20,000 registered voters who’d died.

But don’t reach for the Chicago political playbook just yet. Secretary of State Sam Reed said Friday that the vast majority of the errors seem to stem from forgetfulness, not fraud.

“We expect that very few, if any, of these citizens double-voted,” he said. “In most cases, people moved and simply forgot to notify their local elections offices.”

Reed said 30 cases of apparent double-voting have been referred to election officials in 14 counties for investigation. Sometimes, he said, such cases stem from innocent errors, such as a different voter signing the wrong line in a polling place log.

“Obviously, if we catch someone voting twice, we’re certainly going to turn that over to the prosecuting attorney,” Reed said. “And we hope they’re prosecuted to the hilt.”

With the help of federal election money, Reed’s office has built Washington’s first statewide voter database. It includes nearly 4 million voters.

For about three months, state workers have been combing the list for duplicate voters, people in prison, and the dead.

Until recently, the records were kept independently by each of the state’s 39 counties, Reed said. And counties could not get access to the federal Social Security Administration database of deaths. So although many county election offices routinely track in-state deaths through state records and newspaper obituaries, some out-of-state deaths were never discovered.

Before expunging a voting registration, the state sends the voter a letter, Reed said.

“Particularly with baby boomers, we have cases where people have exactly the same name and exactly the same birthdate but are different people,” he said.

The effort to scrub the rolls suffered a court setback recently, when a King County Superior Court judge ruled that Washington was wrongly banning some felons from voting. If a person had served his prison time but still has unpaid fines, fees or victim restitution, the state maintains, he shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Reed’s office is appealing to the state Supreme Court, which is slated to hear the case next month.

In the meantime, he said, state election officials have limited their search for felon voters to just those people who are currently incarcerated.

“So far, we’ve identified about 900 people whose names are both on voter rolls and who are listed as being in prison,” Reed said. The state is investigating those cases to avoid cases of mistaken identity.