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States' Actions to Block Voters Appear Illegal - NYTimes.com Page 3 of 4 Other states described similar problems in entering data. 13 Under the Help America Vote Act, all states were required to build statewide electronic voter registration lists to standardize and centralize voter records that had been kept on the local level. To prevent ineligible voters from casting a ballot, states were also required to clear the electronic lists of duplicates, people who had died or moved out of state, or who had become ineligible for other reasons. Voting rights groups and federal election officials have raised concerns that the methods used to add or remove names vary by state and are conducted with little oversight or transparency. Many states are purging their lists for the first time and appear to be unfamiliar with the 2002 federal law. "Just as voting machines were the major issue that came out of the 200o presidential election and provisional ballots were the big issue from 2004, voter registration and these statewide lists will be the top concern this year," said Daniel P. Tokaii, a law professor at Ohio State University. Voting rights groups have urged voters to check their registrations with local officials. In Michigan, some 33,000 voters were removed from the rolls in August, a figure that is far higher than the number of deaths in the state during the same period -about ~,ioo - or the number of people who moved out of the state -about 4,400, according to data from the Postal Service. In Colorado, some 37,000 people were removed from the rolls in the three weeks after July 21. During that time, about 5,ioo people moved out of the state and about 2,400 died, according to postal data and death records. In Louisiana, at least i8,ooo people were dropped from the rolls in the five weeks after July 23.Overthe same period, at least i,6oo people moved out of state and at least 3,800 died. The secretaries of state in Michigan and Colorado did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for the Louisiana secretary of state said that about half of the numbers of the voters removed from the rolls were people who moved within the state or who died. The remaining ii,ooo or so people seem to have been removed by local officials for other reasons that were not clear, the spokesman said. The purge estimates were calculated using data from state election officials, who produce a snapshot every month or so of the voter rolls with details about each registered voter on record, making it possible to determine how many have been removed. The Times's methodology for calculating the purge estimates was reviewed by two voting experts, Kimball Brace, the director of Election Data Services, a Washington consulting firm that tracks voting trends, and R. Michael Alvarez, a political science professor at the California Institute of Technolo~v. By using the Social Security database so extensively, states are flagging extra registrations and creating extra work for local officials who are already struggling to process all the registration applications by Election Day. "I simply don't have the staff to keep up," said Ann McFall, the supervisor of elections in Volusia County, Fla. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/us/politics/09voting.html?_r=1 &sq=purge&st=cse&... 10/16/2008