37.6% 4 3.3%
THE CLUE OF BUTTER AND TICKLE
Enter Earnestine Butter and Blake Tickle, whose unusual voter histories in Shelby County shed more light on what happened to voters who were omitted from the list.
It appears that in Shelby County, election workers made special efforts to find and process forms for voters trying to vote early whose names were not on the list. This was heroic, but not good enough. Overall, the percentage of early votes among all voters left off the list was depressed by 20%, indicating that these voters faced real obstacles. Thousands had to return on Election Day in order to vote.
Leaving names off the list places voters to an unequal playing field, which can be exploited by partisans. If the voter is the wrong color, has a voter history connected with the wrong party, or the poll worker is just too harried or impatient to help the voter navigate through extra administrative steps needed to vote, that voter can be disenfranchised. And running around finding forms in a pile when voters aren't on the list enters legally murky waters.
EARLY VOTING PERCENTAGES WERE DEPRESSED FOR THOSE LEFT OFF THE LIST
According to the Statement of Votes Cast for this election, only 821 provisional ballots were cast including both early and Election Day votes. A total of 15,199 voters listed on the Election Day voter list were omitted from the early voting and of these, only 43% managed to early vote vs a 63% early vote rate for voters not omitted from the list.
Clearly, like Blake Tickle and Earnestine Butter, thousands voted early even though they weren't on the early voting list, but as evidenced by the depressed percentage of early votes in the omitted group, thousands had difficulty voting early.
TRACING THE PROBLEM TO DATA ENTRY LOGISTICS
Enter the next piece of evidence in this small mystery: I found a 2004 worksheet produced by Democratic then-administrator of elections James Johnson, showing the maximum number of voter forms they had been able to enter into the database each day. In 2008, over 14,000 new registration forms needed to be processed in six days, with 9,000 of these submitted the very last day. Based on the 2004 worksheet, the maximum number of forms they were capable of processing per day was smaller than the number of registrations needing to be processed.
If we assume that a Democratically-controlled election administration would be extra-friendly towards getting lots of new Black and college-age registrations entered, it's hard to understand why they didn't. Hiring large numbers of temporary workers isn't a particularly good solution and is likely to increase data entry errors in a database that must be absolutely accurate to protect voting rights.
Logistics for entering tens of thousands of new voter registration forms at once can be daunting. In King County Washington, I observed boxes of registration forms labeled "not entered yet." Then-elections chief Dean Logan had told the press that all new voter registrations had been entered into the system. When an employee saw me looking at those boxes, he hid these boxes under a desk.
In late October 2008, the Georgia Secretary of State's office began an investigation into who threw more than 75,000 Fulton County voter registration cards into a trash bin. After getting a call from a resident, officials found more than 30 boxes of voter registration application cards in a construction trash bin at Atlanta Technical College. (2)
Election officials have told me that when everyone is extra-diligent, putting as many new registrations as they can into the system, it can crash the statewide database.
The bottom line is this: When the government requires data entry using deadlines that are impossible to implement, the result can turn into lies, employee misconduct and cover-ups. Submitting new registration forms immediately is the best way to protect voting rights. This will give us more complete voter rolls, better data quality, with fewer errors, and is the best way to make sure the voters you just registered can actually vote.
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