A 1993 federal law forces about 116,000 voters with unknown addresses to stay on the Kansas voter list. That means almost 7 percent of Kansas voters have addresses where mail cannot be delivered. Kansas has about 1.7 million registered voters.

The number of voters with questionable addresses was as high as 174,000 in May 2008, and is down from November 2007 when it was about 154,000. The numbers vary over time and are reduced when lists are purged after federal elections.

Analysis to find possible voter fraud statistically in Kansas is almost impossible because precinct codes are not consistent between the voter registration file and the reported election results. A simple check by precinct of whether there are more voters in an election than registered is not possible using existing statewide data available to the public without contacting many county clerks for explanations of the two systems of precinct names. For example, read more about problems in Allen County.

This article reviews why we have so many voters with unknown addresses and looks at approaches used in some counties to deal with local problems. Briefly:

• The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 changed procedures used by Kansas counties to remove voters.
• The Help America Vote Act of 2002 provided money for a new statewide voter registration system.
• Most counties learn about invalid addresses for voters through an annual check by the Kansas Secretary of State against data from the U.S. Post Office’s National Change of Address system.
• Some local issues affect voter registration approaches. We talked to election officials in Chautauqua, Ford, Geary, Johnson, Osage, Sedgwick, and Wyandotte Counties to get their perspectives.
• Tabular data and maps by county show voter registration statistics in Nov 2007 and Dec 2009.

After the analysis of the Dec 2009 data was complete, Wyandotte County reported an update on Feb 8.  See the Wyandotte County section for this updated information.

Future articles will look at how these voters without known addresses may have been overrepresented in certain state legislative races in 2008, and how they may have been a deciding factor in a 2006 election.

National Voter Registration Act of 1993

ELVIS and Voter Registration List

“Active” vs. “Inactive” Voters

• Address Verification through National Change of Address (NCOA) System
• Voter Registration Cards
• Duplicate and Multi-State Checks

Selected Local Issues and Solutions

• Sedgwick County
• Osage County
• Chautauqua County
• Ford County
• Geary County
• Wyandotte County
• Johnson County

Maps

• “Inactive” Voters [%]  by County
• Voters Not Casting Ballots Since 2002 [%] by County
• “Invalid” Ballot History Codes by County [%] by County

Future

Related

Offices for the Kansas Secretary of State are in Memorial Hall in Topeka

According to Brad Bryant, Deputy Assistant Kansas Secretary of State for Elections, prior to NVRA voters were routinely purged from lists in Kansas after they missed voting in two presidential elections.

NVRA, also known as the “Motor Voter Act,” was passed in 1993 but was not mandatory until 1995. This federal law provided more voter registration uniformity among the states, but imposed new conditions as to when voters could be removed. In particular, NVRA does not allow removal of a registered voter for not voting, which had been common in Kansas.

The more formal process of NVRA added additional administrative costs and mandates some voters remain on the list until certain conditions are met.

NVRA allows previous voters who have lost contact with their election office to vote if they show up at their original polling place. Since these voters are not first time voters, current Kansas law allows them to vote without presenting any form of ID.

Depending on the reason voters are marked as “inactive” for having an undeliverable mailing address, some may be voting in incorrect state rep or state senate districts — or other district contests like school districts or county commissioners.

There is a potential constitutional conflict under the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment when the result of an election by voters in a particular state district could be affected by those not known to live in that district.

ELVIS and Voter Registration List

The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 provided money to the states for better election systems.

As part of the Congressional mandates of HAVA, a new statewide voter system was introduced in Kansas in 2006. The ELection Voter Information System (ELVIS) replaced the 105 systems used by Kansas counties with a single statewide system.

This new system brought more uniformity on how voter data was handled, but each county clerk or election office still maintained control over their data.

The Kansas Open Records Act (KORA) allows any interested citizen to purchase the list of all registered voters on a CD for non-commercial purposes. The data can be purchased by completing a Statewide Voter Registration Data Request form and paying the required fee. The voter file is created by the staff of the Secretary of State using data from ELVIS.

Elected legislators buy this voter file to assist in communications with voters using their franking allowance. Candidates buy the data for use in campaigns. Researchers use the voter file for insight into Kansas elections, such as the analysis in this article.

Unless noted otherwise, all data in this article is from Dec. 29, 2009.

The voter file has a “status” data item that can have values of “Active” or “Inactive”.

Better words to describe this status would be “Valid address” for “Active” and “Unknown Address” for “Inactive.”

County clerks and elections offices mark a voter as “Inactive”, i.e., “Unknown Address” whenever the post office returns any communication with a voter as undeliverable, or when addresses cannot be verified through the U.S. Post Office.

Several methods are used to mark voters as “inactive” and to trigger a confirmation process:

Address Verification through National Change of Address (NCOA) System

Brad Bryant explained that the Secretary of State’s office runs the statewide voter list through a National Change of Address check every year, and provides the results to the counties to update their lists. The NCOA reference database is maintained by the U.S. Post Office.

Most counties use the NCOA feedback provided by the Secretary of State to update their records.

In a telephone interview Sedgwick County Election Commissioner Bill Gale explained that when NCOA flags a voter for moving out of the county, his office flags the voter as “inactive” and that triggers a confirmation process.

The confirmation process includes a mailing to the last known address. The post office is asked to forward the mailing and this often finds the voter at a new address.

The relocated voter can then provide new location information to the election office. In cases where the voter moved within the county or within the state the voter stays on the voter list.

When there is no response to the confirmation request, NVRA mandates the voter must stay on the list until after two federal elections have passed. In Kansas these are usually the November general elections.

But, NCOA has some problems but county election officials catch many of them.

Geary County Clerk Rebecca Bossemeyer recalled an occasion when NCOA flagged a college student as no longer living in Geary County. But, NCOA flagged not only the student who moved, but the whole family. Bossemeyer’s staff knew not to mark the whole family as inactive because of personal knowledge.

Wyandotte Election Commissioner Bruce Newby recalled a case when NCOA did not handle a move correctly within the same apartment complex.

NCOA has additional problems in Johnson County, which is discussed next.

Voter Registration Cards

Johnson County uses a different approach than NCOA changes.

For historical reasons, much of northern Johnson County is known by the post office as “Shawnee Mission.” Many cities can have a “Shawnee Mission” post office address including, Fairway, Shawnee, Lenexa, Mission, Overland Park, and Prairie Village. Historically, the post office has not assigned unique zip codes to all cities since the whole area is “Shawnee Mission.”

Johnson County Election Commissioner Brian Newby explained that the Johnson County Election Office, even before he was Commissioner, found the post office city designations were not always correct and in many cases NCOA feedback was not helpful.

To avoid the NCOA problems, and because of the transient population in Johnson County, his office mails out voter registration cards every election cycle to notify voters of their polling place. When these cards are returned as undeliverable, the voter is marked “inactive” and the confirmation process described above by Bill Gale is triggered.

This approach of mailing voter registration cards to voters periodically may leave some voters on the roll if the mailings are not returned as undeliverable by the post office. For example, the Kansas City Star publisher was registered to vote in Kansas and Missouri in 2008 until this article was published because mail was accepted at a Kansas address where he no longer lived.

Duplicate and Multi-State Checks

The Secretary of State’s office periodically checks for voters with duplicate entries and informs counties about the problem for them to process.

During the analysis for this article, I found about 80 likely duplicate voters with 2 or more records.

One Miami County voter appears to have three duplicate entries, each with a different voter number, but with identical voter information including name and address. This will be reported to the Secretary of State’s office for their review.

Brad Bryant explained that a multi-state duplicate check is underway now and they are working with 13 states to find duplicates.

Sedgwick County

Sedgwick County. Bill Gale’s office in Wichita uses a variety of additional checks to find duplicate voters. He said his office stretches the capabilities of the ELVIS system to find duplicates. These duplicates can be caused by simple human error in the spelling of a name, or transposed or incorrect digits in dates.

The human error can be caused by incorrect information on  a voter registration form.

Gale said his office identified a number of older voters who had been registered for a number of years but who had not voted in 10 to 20 years. Finding obituaries for a number of these individuals, sometimes using Internet resources, allowed removal from the voter list.

Gale said Sedgwick County always tries to include a year in the ballot code. This enables a complete review of voter history to determine the last year of voting. Sedgwick County only has 1.6 percent ballot codes that do not reflect the year of voting, which is far lower than the statewide average of 12.2 percent.

Gale noted there are some problems with homeless voters registering at shelters since mailings may not be received.

Efforts by Gale and his staff are reflected in his county’s statistics. Sedgwick’s 3.4 percent inactive voter rate is lower than Shawnee County’s 5 percent rate and Johnson County’s 6.4 percent rate. After Douglas with 7.2 percent and Reno with 7.9 percent the five remaining of the largest 10 counties have double-digit inactive voter rates, including Butler, Leavenworth, Riley, Saline and Wyandotte.

Osage County

Osage County. Clerk Rhonda Beets in a recent discussion explained she uses the NCOA information from the Secretary of State to identify inactive voters in her county.

I showed Beets a summary of Osage County voter data from my analysis, including some voters who have not voted in a number of years. Not voting by itself is not a valid legal reason to remove a voter, but such lists are interesting to explore. I spotted two of my cousins who no longer live in Osage County and haven’t voted since 1996. NCOA didn’t detect these voters as having moved. I need to check if the multi-state duplicate check finds them in Oklahoma, since that state was recently added to the multi-state check.

Felons can be removed from the voter list but Beets explained she was unable to find the proper documentation from federal courts to remove a voter who had been convicted of a felony in another state.

Chautauqua County

Chautauqua County. Statistics about inactive voters don’t tell the whole story about what’s happening in a county.

”We’re trying” was Cammie Farner’s response in a telephone interview about the high percentage of inactive voters in her county in southeast Kansas along the Oklahoma border. She is the Chautauqua County Clerk with a small staff.

Chautauqua County’s 24.2 percent inactive voters is the highest percentage in the state in Dec 2009 and is up from 11 percent just two years ago. But Farner explains the high inactive percentage is an indication she was doing her job diligently since it takes several years to fix such issues due to the federal NVRA.  After the purge following the Nov 2010 elections her county likely can have a much lower percentage.

Farner explained a recent multi-state check finally included Oklahoma and found 66 duplicate voters. These voters were marked as “inactive” and then must go through the confirmation process.

Farner said the Internet makes researching death records much easier than in the past.

Feedback from election poll workers about problems in the voter list was also an important source of information about voter problems according to Farner.

Ford County

Ford County. Clerk Sharon Seibel said NCOA information from the Secretary of State was their primary source of information for marking inactive voters.

Seibel said the transient nature of Ford County (Dodge City) was the main problem in keeping track of voters.

Geary County

Bossemeyer said the new ELVIS system had made the process of checking for duplicates and cross-state checks much easiter.

With Fort Riley as part of her county, Bossemeyer said the area was more transient than most in Kansas, which may explain the high inactive rate in 2007.

In 2008 none of 569 voters living at Fort Riley in Geary County voted in the August primary election, but analysis showed 37 percent of them should not have been on the list.

Wyandotte County

Wyandotte County. Bruce Newby, Wyandotte County Election Commissioner said his office primarily uses NCOA data to mark inactive voters but he advocates for a “multi-approach” using a variety of methods to identify problem voters.

He said Wyandotte County does not normally mail out voter registration cards like nearby Johnson County. But, a recent Department of Justice investigation of several Wyandotte County buildings identified needed improvements, which included a mandate to change to a number of polling places. Because of this, affected voters will be notified with new registration cards of a change in polling place in the near future and that mailing could be used to identify inactive voters.

Newby said he was aware of some homeless people registering at shelters but by law had to honor voter registration requests from any valid mailing address. He was aware of one voter in the past that was registered at an empty lot that had a mail box.

I asked Newby about an investigation conducted in 2008 of empty lots in Wyandotte County with voters listed. He was confident the NCOA verification process would eventually catch those.

He said his office did not receive information from the county about the demolition of homes, but that wouldn’t affect how he had to follow federal law to remove voters.

Newby thought the high inactive voter rate for his county was caused largely by a transient population, especially voters moving between Wyandotte County and Missouri.

[Update, Feb 8, 2010].  Bruce Newby called today and said his office discussed why their number of inactive voters  may be higher than other counties.  They discovered they had not yet run the “purge” between the 2008 and 2010 election cycles and took the opportunity to run that purge.

Newby reported the number of inactive voters in Wyandotte County was reduced by 8,585 after the purge and they only have 5,892 now.  In Dec 2009 Wyandotte County had 14,603 inactive voters.

That means now only 7.2 percent of the 82,278 voters in Wyandotte County have addresses where mail cannot be delivered.  Their rate is now about the Kansas average of 6.8 percent.

Johnson County

Johnson County. Brian Newby, Johnson County Election Commissioner, explained his county’s procedures:

“We did a normal purge after the November 2008 election. You’ll notice that our overall number of registered voters dropped and is just now reaching the levels around the 2008 presidential election. The inactives where we’ve had postcards returned and who haven’t voted in two November elections were purged. The next removal is after November 2010.”

Newby said in a recent mail ballot election in Merriam he was not required by state law to mail to inactive voters since there was already an indication their address was invalid. But about 10 percent of voters in that mail ballot election could not be delivered by the post office. Those voters will now be mailed confirmation postcards to determine if their status should be changed to inactive.

KSA 25-433 says:

Ballots shall not be mailed to any inactive voter who, based on information provided by the postal service, appears to have moved to a residence address outside the county in which the voter is currently registered and who has been mailed a confirmation notice

Newby said that some questionable registrations are assigned the address of the JoCo Election Office so any changes can be monitored more closely. Currently there are 15 inactive voters with the address of the election office.

Newby is interested in collecting cost information to help in decision making for future elections. He presented cost information about vote centers at the Future of Elections in Kansas Study Group meetings held last year.

Three maps are shown above in the graphic:

• “Inactive” Voters [%] by County
• Voters Not Casting Ballots Since 2002 [%] by County
• “Invalid” Ballot History Codes [%] by County

The first map shows the rate of inactive voters — those with unknown addresses — by county. The state-wide total is 115,956 inactive voters, which is 6.8 percent.

The middle two quartiles, quartiles 2 and 3, could be seen as “typical” rates while counties in the 1st quartile have fairly low rates. Low rates could be the result of very effective bookkeeping or the result of not doing much about the problem.

Counties in quartile 4 have rates above typical values. The four counties in the “High” category are statistical outliers and are considered to have unusually high values. Those with high inactive rates now could have low rates after the next purse. For example, Geary County had 31.3 percent inactive in 2007 and only has a 4.7 percent rate now.

The second map on page 2, “Voters Not Casting Ballots Since 2002 [%],”  shows the percent of voters that have not voted in the last two presidential elections.  But, NVRA does not allow this criteria by itself to be a reason a voter is removed.

A map on page 3, “Invalid Ballot History Codes [%],” shows how many ballot codes are “invalid” in the sense there is no way to figure out what they mean without compiling separate lists from each county clerk or election office.

fter the analysis of the Dec 2009 data was complete, Wyandotte County reported an update on Feb 8.  See the Wyandotte County section for this updated information.

View a table of the Dec 2009 data summary here:

Summary of Registered Voters in Kansas by County, Dec 2009 (Table) –

See similar maps and tabular data for Nov 2007.

NVRA mandates a large number of voters be kept on the rolls even with invalid addresses.

Some on the left suggest passive registration, such as a universal voter registration, will solve current problems. The lefty Nation Magazine published a call for universal voter registration last year.

On the right, John Fund wrote a book about How the Obama Administration Threatens to Undermine Our Elections and worries that

The feds will tell the states: ‘take everyone on every list of welfare that you have, take everyone on every list of unemployed you have, take everyone on every list of property owners, take everyone on every list of driver’s license holders and register them to vote regardless of whether they want to be …’

Brian Newby from Johnson County said he has not evaluated any proposed passive registration system and had not compared it to the active registration system used today. But Newby said “it seems like it trades one problem for another.”

• Summary of Registered Voters in Kansas by County, Dec 29, 2009:  Maps and Table.
  • Inactive Voters,
  • Voters Not Casting Ballots Since 2002,
  • Invalid Ballot History Codes.
• Summary of Registered Voters in Kansas by County, Nov 14, 2007:  Maps and Table.
  • Inactive Voters,
  • Voters Not Casting Ballots Since 1999,
  • Invalid Ballot History Codes.
• Secretary of State releases report on future of elections in Kansas, Pittsburg Morning Sun, Jan 14, 2010.
• Comparing Voter Registration to Nov. ‘08 Ballots in Allen County. Too Difficult?, Kansas Meadowlark, Feb 8, 2009.
• Fort Riley doesn’t vote in primary, but 37 percent of those voters shouldn’t be on list, Kansas Meadowlark, Aug 8, 2008.
• Can Google Street Views Be Used to Find Registered Voters at Empty Lots in Wyandotte County?, Kansas Meadowlark, Feb 21, 2008.
• Kansas May Have About 190,000 Phantom Voters: Could Voter Fraud in Kansas Be Relatively Easy?, Kansas Meadowlark, Jan 13, 2008.