In addition to the thousands of implausible birthdates and too-obvious-to-miss duplicate voter I mentioned yesterday, I've found some more quality control issues with the new statewide database --
* About 450,000 have U.S. mailing addresses different from the residence, but only about 1/4 of these include the city and state. The other 342,000 that don't include a city and state show a zip code, but its pretty hard to use that information for mailing or integrity checking unless one also has a separate zip code/city database.
* At least 458,000 voters (12%) are listed in the wrong state legislative district. That includes everybody in the following counties:
-- Kittitas, in the 13th, shows up as the 3rd.
-- Lewis, in the 20th, shows up as the 0th
-- PendOreille , in the 7th, shows up as the 0th
-- Snohomish, where the 39th shows up as the 35th, the 38th shows up as the 30th, the 44th shows up as the 40th, the 21st shows up as the 20th and the 1st shows up as the 10th. In addition, 21,000 Snohomish residents are incorrectly listed as in the 15th and 14,000 incorrectly in the 25th, but it's not yet clear to me what districts they should be in.
(It looks like I found 15 members of the state legislature who are listed in the wrong districts, mostly in Snohomish County. Sideshow Bob, call your office)
I've now loaded the database into my massively fast server and will see what else I can find.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at February 03, 2006 12:06 PM | Email ThisARGHH!
Posted by: Jeremy on February 3, 2006 12:46 PMWelcome to Chaos.
Posted by: Cheryl on February 3, 2006 12:52 PMStefan, do you think the scope of the problem is such that the current database could be corrected by officials contacting voters whose information is incorrect, or do you think it is time to call for statewide re-registration? It seems to me that re-registration is the best solution. An efficient way to re-register the state would be to have a state-run website where individuals could enter in their driver's license number, certify that the information on the face of the ID was accurate and up-to-date, enter in supplemental information for voter registrations as required by law, and bring that photo ID with them to the polls on voting day. Obviously the Secretary of State would have to cooperate with the Department of Licenscing on this for linking the databases. Everybody without a state-issued ID could register in person. What do you think the solution is?
Thanks for all that you do.
Posted by: Chris from Lakewood on February 3, 2006 12:55 PMThat's the Democrat's motto!
What Stefan's research has revealed - is the potential for a complete breakdown in the political dynamics of the State! Counties will have people voting in the wrong districts for the wrong people and other's will be missing voters in their areas! How will anyone know if their city, county and state representatives are voted for by the correct voters? Or - for that matter - lost races due to such errors in voter registration?
This sounds like the Liberal Democrats sneaky way of illegal re-districting for votes!
Was this already screwed up and just transferred to the new database?
Seeing all of these descrepencies makes me "feel" so good that our government officials take our right to vote so seriously.
/sarc
Posted by: SouthernRoots on February 3, 2006 03:56 PM