Keeping track of voter registration information is serious business as it is vital to insuring that our elections run as smoothly and securely as possible. Until recently each of Oregon’s 36 county elections offices had their own voter registration list. However, the Help America Vote Act, which was passed by the United States Congress in 2002, required that all states develop “a single, uniform, official, centralized, interactive computerized statewide voter registration list defined, maintained, and administered at the State level that contains the name and registration information of every legally registered voter in the State.” In 2006 our elections division did just that, putting together the Oregon Central Voter Registration (OCVR) database; and the system has born tremendous fruit. Where counties previously had problems with tasks like tracking down duplicate registrations, they can now access voter registration information across county lines through the OCVR database instantaneously in order to perform a variety of cross checking tasks.
In August of 2008 the State of Oregon and State of Washington undertook a pilot project, which sought to build on the success of OCVR implementation by comparing voter registration databases across state lines to check for potential duplicates. A fantastic overview of this Oregon-Washington pilot project written by the National Academies of Science can be found here.
On September 4th of this year, both Oregon and Washington sent out a letter (pictured below) informing voters that they may be registered to vote in both states. Attached to the letter is a short form that allows voters to indicate whether they were indeed registered in a second state and to cancel that invalid registration.
So far, about 7,000 letters – 4,500 in Washington and 2,500 in Oregon – have been sent to the matches who came up during the check, but if you have just registered in Oregon after being registered in Washington, or vice-versa, you may want to print a copy of the letter, fill it out and send it in to your respective elections division for them to insure you aren’t registered to vote in both states on accident.
This project will help us perform a key function; tightening up our voter rolls to make sure that they are as accurate as possible. It is just another way that Oregon elections is staying ahead of the curve nationally with innovative projects.
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