Illinois to miss deadline for voter rolls law
Database probably won't be ready till '08
By John McCormick
Tribune staff reporter
Published December 30, 2005

With its storied history of the living voting early and often and even the dead casting ballots on Election Day, it could be argued that few states need a computer system to cull bloated voter rolls more than Illinois.

Despite a Jan. 1 federal deadline, however, the state is poised to be among the last in the nation to create an electronic system that allows local election officials to search for fraud and errors by comparing their voter registration lists with those of other jurisdictions.

Illinois officials say they do not expect to have such a network running until the middle of 2008, more than two years after the federal deadline and six years after the requirement was approved by Congress.

"We have kept in contact with the Justice Department and let them know what progress we are making," said Dan White, executive director of the State Board of Elections.

White said he does not expect the state to lose any of the $98 million it has received through the federal Help America Vote Act. Most of that money is being used to buy voting machines for the disabled, although a portion will go toward the database.

Federal officials, meanwhile, say they still are trying to assess how many states will miss the deadline and whether any sanctions will be imposed.

"We will evaluate the facts of every situation to determine whether an enforcement action is necessary," Justice Department spokesman Eric Holland said.

A year-end survey by the National Association of Secretaries of State showed that at least 11 states will miss the deadline. In addition to Illinois, other states include Wisconsin, New York, Nevada and Colorado.

To create the database, Illinois election officials are seeking to award a $6.5 million, no-bid contract to Chicago-based Catalyst Consulting Group, which designed the less sophisticated voter registration system now used by the state.

The current system allows cities and counties to transmit information about their voters to the state, but it does not allow the two-way communication required by federal law. Also, the new system likely will combine other government records such as driver's license information to provide more precise voter identification.

Some local election officials, meanwhile, say they have grown weary of the state's delays in getting the new system running.

"They screwed around, and we are having a major delay," said Champaign County Clerk Mark Shelden, a Republican. "It could have been avoided."

The creation of interactive voter databases was one provision of the Help America Vote Act, federal legislation passed after the 2000 election debacle in Florida

In Illinois, it will mean connecting each of the state's 110 election offices to a central computer server.

State election officials say two of those offices, in rural counties, do not even have high-speed data connections.

Election observers say bloated voter rolls make fraud and election errors more likely because the names of those who should no longer be on the state's voting list might be used by imposters.

A 1996 comprehensive canvass of the voter list maintained by the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners found almost 250,000 names to remove, including between 5,000 and 10,000 names of people who were dead. Most of those removed were people who moved to a different precinct but failed to register there.

A 2004 Tribune analysis of voter records in six key swing states--New Mexico, Florida, Iowa, Ohio, Michigan and Minnesota--found more than 181,000 dead people listed on the rolls.

Under the new system, each voter will be assigned a unique number, which should make it harder for someone with a common name to vote in multiple locations.

"You need to look for duplicates, not just in your own jurisdiction, but in others as well," McHenry County Clerk Katherine Schultz said.

By creating more accurate voter lists, officials said, they also hope to be able to reduce the number of provisional ballots. Those ballots are given to voters who show up at the polls but can't be found on registration lists. The ballots are reviewed after the election to determine their validity.

The new system also offers the promise of saved postage on the thousands of voter registration cards that are mailed periodically, then returned because the voter has changed addresses.

"There is a lot of cost to having extra voters on the rolls," said Champaign County's Shelden, who estimates that it costs his county about $1 per piece of mail sent, then returned because of a bad address.