WASHINGTON—For most of the in-person absentee voters in Virginia, voting in the general election begins Monday, Sept. 24, marking what will be a particularly testing time for election officials this year.
Changes to voting registration procedures include voter identification requirements and provisional ballots, as well as the actual instructions that go out to the 134 jurisdictions in Virginia.
“After all the preparations we have gone through, it is game time,” said Donald Palmer, secretary at Virginia State Board of Elections.
Palmer admitted that he had no idea what sort of problems he might encounter from the changes, although he feels he has done all within his power to ensure things run smoothly.
Palmer’s uncertainty is reflected in many other states, said Doug Chapin, director of an election administration program at the University of Minnesota.
Palmer and Chapin were speaking at the forum, “Are we ready to run the 2012 elections?” at the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) in Washington, D.C., Sept. 19.
Chapin said there is hardly a state in America that has not made some sort of reform to its voter registration system this year, creating headaches for administrators and voters alike.
He said intense political fighting, at both the presidential and the congressional levels, has manifested in “a tremendous state of flux across the country” regarding voting procedures.
Also the editor of the election reform website ElectionLine, Chapin is concerned that fights in some states have not been resolved, despite the commencement of voting.
“There is a lot of uncertainty about what the rules of the game are,” he said.
Justin Levitt, associate professor of law at the Loyola Law School, has a particular interest in election administration and redistricting. He said that people are working hard on the ground to make sure the elections run smoothly, but uncertainty will prove challenging.
“Some of the changes have already happened, and some we don’t even know about,” he told the forum.
Reform Needed
Levitt believes that voter registration upheavals are also a result of state endeavors to modernize the voter registration system, he said, which is more relevant to the 19th century rather than to a 21st-century voting environment.
The Pew Research Center reached a similar conclusion in a 2011 report. The report described the U.S. voter registration system as outdated, poorly designed, plagued by errors, and unnecessarily expensive.
Significantly, 51 million eligible citizens were identified as unregistered, more than 24 percent of the eligible population. Moreover, around 2 million deceased voters remained on the electoral roll in 2011 and around 2.75 million were registered in more than one state, the Pew study found.
Different voting laws across America’s 50 states compound the problem, said Levitt, as voter registration varies from a signature on a poll vote or photo identification, to a voter registration form and online registration.
Absentee voting and early registration requirements have also become contentious, with the pressure to establish appropriate procedures heightened by an increasingly mobile population.
Absentee voting has increased from around 5 percent of the voting population in the 1980s to around one-third today, according to John Fortier, BPC host of the event and author of a book on electoral procedures.
Technology is an obvious tool to resolve many voter registration problems, particularly in maintaining identification data that can move with the individual across states.
However, there are still problems to iron out, warns Levitt, pointing to the frequency of two people sharing the same name and birth date as an example of confusion. “It is more often than you think,” he said.
The panel discussed the possibility of the 2012 presidential election result hanging on the outcome of one state, as it did in the contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000.
As voting commences, this is when election officials remember their election prayer, said Chapin: “Please God, don’t let it be a close vote.”
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