Every U.S. state has election rolls of registered voters. Those rolls, under Federal law, must be maintained and cleaned regularly. Effective cleaning is not being done.
The following is the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) – the minimum requirement that current technology enables. Any entity that does not offer such minimal services cannot claim to adequately clean voter rolls.
Every item on this list is available today, at a modest cost, and can be brought into production, with modern compute technology, in any state in 45 days or less.
- Voter registration rolls should be reconciled, every 30 days, with county personal property tax rolls ensuring every address at which a registered voter resides is valid.
- Voter registration rolls should be snapshotted, by date, at least monthly. Every voter roll snapshot is compared with every previous snapshot and the differences preserved in a readable file for public review – with graphical and tabular representations.
- Every voter address should be scanned by an artificial intelligence (AI) engine to take the same address, if presented in multiple ways, and bring it into a uniform address type.
- Beginning 45 days before early voting, the Minimum Viable Product should begin daily snapshots of the voter rolls. These comparisons identify new voters added after deadlines, zip code changes or other election commission changes that inject uncertainty and doubt into election outcomes.
- Available state databases should be reconciled against the state’s voter rolls. DMV records, death records, NCOA change of address records, lists of non-citizens and any other information the state captures should be available to reconcile against the voter rolls to insure consistency.
- The system should be able to be run as an outside service (SaaS), or as a state-run service within the state’s IT infrastructure, in a cloud (someone else’s data center) as the state mandates – inexpensively, implemented in 45 days or less.
- The MVP should identify any inserted characters, hidden characters or strings in voter registration numbers rendering them difficult for citizens to process on current computers. Such control characters and strings should be removed and if not possible – identified.
- The MVP should operate real time with queries, sorts or other data manipulation happening in less than 10 seconds, across all databases visible from a mobile device.
- During early voting, the MVP system should receive daily updates of who voted (electronic poll book) and compare each day’s data with all previous day’s data – insuring cast ballot information is never modified.
- The MVP should identify, every 30 days, the state’s undeliverable ballot locations. This is the list of voter addresses to which the election commission will mail a ballot, but such a ballot will be undeliverable.
These are not “best in class” capabilities – these are the minimum capabilities available today. Not one state in the U.S. comes even close to these capabilities.
Some state executives are driving their digital transformation so they can uproot fraud in their state program rolls – Medicaid, state WIC programs, and voter rolls.