2008 COMMENTARY

October 16, 2008

What Sam Reed must do to prevent felon voting

Olympia—Jonathan Bechtle, Evergreen Freedom Foundation’s Legal Counsel, made the following comments about KIRO-TV’s investigative report revealing that 24,000 felon voters will be able to vote in the November general election.

“Election integrity is attained by balancing voter access with vote security–every legal voter should have an opportunity to vote, and should not have his or her ballot cancelled out by an illegal vote. We won’t have integrity in Washington elections as long as our Secretary of State thinks it’s ok to ignore thousands of illegal voters on the rolls. While he has removed many ineligible voters from the roll, he needs to finish the job.

“Secretary Reed could have, and promised to, expand his search for felon voters a year and a half ago after the state supreme court settled a question about what types of felons could be allowed to vote. He did not do that, leading to the problem uncovered by KIRO-TV. Now it will be much harder to fix because ballots are already being mailed out.

“Secretary Reed must act quickly to address the problem. Here’s what he needs to do:

State law (RCW 29A.08.520) lays out the procedure he must follow:

Step 1: ‘If a person is found on a felon list and the statewide voter registration list, the secretary of state or county auditor shall confirm the match through a date of birth comparison’

Step 2: ‘If confirmed, suspend the voter registration from the official state voter registration list’

Step 3: ‘Send the person at his or her last known voter registration address a notice of the proposed cancellation and an explanation of the requirements for restoring the right to vote.’

“Secretary Reed should immediately put every staffer he has available to work on matching felon records to voter records. To prevent any disenfranchisement of non-felons it may be necessary to call people or courts to confirm records, but Reed needs to do whatever it takes. It will be a week or so before ballots start returning to auditors, so they still have a little time to intercept ballots from these felon voters before they disappear into the ballot stream. Even if election officials can only verify 500 of the felons, that’s still 500 less illegal votes in this election.

“If any non-felons accidentally get caught up in the review, they would still have the right to cast a provisional ballot that would be reviewed by the county canvassing boards. So Reed needs to keep the counties updated with exactly who he is cancelling and the records he depended on to make the cancelations.

“Several races on the ballot are likely to be close, and the last thing we need is thousands of illegal votes casting doubt on the outcome. Secretary Reed needs to act quickly to ensure this election will be honest and accurate.”

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