Report: 1.8M dead registered to vote in U.S.

By Mackenzie Weinger 

The United States’s voter registration system is in chaos — with about 24 million registrations are no longer valid and nearly 2 million dead people still on voter rolls, according to a new report Tuesday.

Along with the one of every eight voter registrations that is not valid or has significant inaccuracies, there are 2.75 million people currently registered to vote in more than one state, the Pew Center on the States study found. And the millions of problematic registrations aren’t the only issue — researchers estimate at least 51 million eligible U.S. citizens aren’t registered to vote. That’s nearly one in four, or 24 percent of the eligible population.

Additionally, about 12 million records have incorrect addresses, meaning it’s unlikely any mailings can reach these voters, the research in the report shows.

Still, David Becker, director of Pew’s Election Initiatives, said that the center’s findings did not suggest any kind of voter fraud or voter suppression from these problems, but noted they do “underscore the need for an improved system.”

There also are more than 1.8 million deceased people who still have active registration on voter rolls, Pew found. And, Becker said, the outdated, inefficient systems currently in place are “not designed to keep up with deaths as they occur.”

The slow and ineffective paper-based systems are also expensive, Pew found. It costs the U.S. 12 times more to maintain a voter list than it does for Canada, which spends just 35 cents to keep up its list in an election year. And in Canada — which has innovative technology and data-matching methods in place — 93 percent of the eligible population is registered, the survey points out.

Part of the problem in the U.S., researchers say, stems from many states still using paper-based systems. Millions of paper applications have to be printed and election offices must do the data-entry by hand — which means most states face an expensive, inefficient process of updating voter rolls each election year.

The fix is online voter registration, according to Pew. “It is in fact more secure than the traditional paper methods of voter registration,” Becker said.

“Voter registration is the gateway to participating in our democracy, but these antiquated, paper-based systems are plagued with errors and inefficiencies,” Becker added in a statement. “These problems waste taxpayer dollars, undermine voter confidence, and fuel partisan disputes over the integrity of our elections.”

Becker pointed to Maricopa County in Arizona as a prime example of a place that has successfully transitioned to an innovative system — with online voter registration, the county has saved more than $1 million over five years.

Meanwhile, Pew said it is working with several states this cycle to upgrade their voter registration system. The new approach includes states creating ways for voters to submit information online and having election offices compare registration lists with other data sources such as motor vehicle records.