The NBC affiliate in Phoenix, AZ ran a story regarding what appears to be a flaw in processes and/or software used by Maricopa County to streamline voter registration via driver's license renewal processing. The station investigated after a long-time RESIDENT of the county with a long-time GREEN CARD notified them of a mistake made when he received a "welcome voter" information mailer after renewing his driver's license.
Maricopa County devised some combination of form (paper and/or digital PDF, not totally clear), physical process and software that would allow a person renewing a DRIVERS LICENSE to establish or renew their VOTER REGISTRATION...
...IF they checked a box on the form stating they were a United States CITIZEN.
The man in the story, who is actually a citizen of Belgium but has worked in the US over 20 years on a green card, says he did NOT check that box when completing his driver's license renewal application. When he got his "welcome voter" mailer, he contacted the county to ask why they had mailed him the "welcome voter" mailer and if they had indeed actually registered him to vote IN ERROR. The answers they gave did not satisfy him so he contacted the local station. The explanations given to the station do not make sense entirely either.
At this point, it isn't clear if the county keeps submitted driver's license renew forms on paper, scans them to digital PDF files or just discards them after processing. Thus, it isn't clear if they can "prove" whether he checked the "US Citizen" box in error or not. If he swears he did not, the next question in the process should be whether paper license applications are processed entirely by humans and if a human made the mistake. If paper license applications are scanned into digital PDF files then processed with Optical Character Recognition software, the next question is whether that processing software was adequately tested to avoid incorrectly triggering the courtesy notification to the Election Board. At this point, the answer is likely not.
So what does this mean for the November 2024 election?
If this man did NOT in fact accidently check the "US Citizen" box yet became registered to vote, Maricopa County's system is missing some human procedural audits and secondary data audits. Maricopa County contains more than half the population of the entire state so the impact of this possible flaw is NOT immaterial. However, the problem is NOT insurmountable to correct, for both mail-in ballots and voting day ballots.
First, America has an anonymous BALLOT, but we do not have anonymous VOTING. When you vote on election day, you have to identify yourself by name and address. The Maricopa County election board could identify a list of all voter entries where (driver's license renewal date = voter registration date) going back (say) three years. Given the county's process, all these entries are likely triggered by their courtesy registration flow. The board can flag those entries for a special manual double-check. That double-check would be performed for in-person voting and when mail-in ballots arrive.
If someone shows up to vote and their name/address is flagged as a auto-registration via driver's license renewal, the poll worker can ask the would-be voter to verbally confirm citizenship before providing a ballot. This avoids any honest mistake while putting the legal onus back on the voter if they are in fact voting illegally. For mail-in ballots, the outer envelope should contain the return address of the voter either by hand-written text or a unique digital bar code that makes it easy to scan the outer envelope to track the arrival of the ballot and mail it back if issues require correction by the voter. Again, as the mail-in ballot arrives, those addresses can be cross-referenced against the "auto-registration" list to contact the sender.
Again, the goal is not to capriciously punish people because of a clerical misunderstanding on the voter's part or an election board worker, the goal is to keep out invalid votes. Finding these cases is a simple data processing problem and there are over 26 days to election day to address it IN PUBLIC without drama or subterfuge.
This processing flaw in Arizona is a good example of why leaving voting processes entirely to the state governments is NOT inherently a good idea. Having the states physically overseeing and securing elections is perfectly fine. However, leaving election PROCESSES to fifty individual state governments guarantees wide variations in steps to be performed by voters and election boards alike. Are there really fifty different GOOD ways to process registrations and votes? Probably not. But in the absence of more consistent rules on HOW such processes should function, every state gets to tinker with the process then attempt to hire companies to assist with creation of forms, software automations, etc. that not only fail to add value, they add opportunity for dumb stuff like this to happen.
WTH
