Wednesday, June 28, 2006

It's About Time

The purging of the voter rolls is finally set to happen. From an Indy Star report:
The Justice Department agreed Tuesday to an Indiana plan designed to eliminate the names of people who have died and those who are listed more than once from the state's voter registration rolls.

Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita last week announced the plan to purge the rolls, following negotiations between state Republicans and Democrats. It would also target convicted felons and voters who no longer live in Indiana or in the county of their registration.

This should have happened many years ago, and then been on a regular schedule, per each four-year cycle. Many counties have had more voters on the rolls than actual population. That's absurd. Better late than never, I suppose.

Also, there is no good reason that the Libertarian Party was excluded from the negotiations. Including Libertarians has the effect of making the proceedings less partisan and more focused on the business at hand. Libertarians are on the ballot, so they should have been included. No effort was made by either party to include the Libertarian Party.

1 comment:

William Larsen said...

I can see two sides to this:

One, if you are dead, you will not vote and therefore, have no impact on the election. However, these people influence the percent of registered voters who voted. If as stated there are large numbers of dead on the list, then maybe we have much heavier voter turn out then we thought. This might make people have a more positive view on voting "if others do it, I will."

Two, it might be possible to have voter fraud where some one votes in the place of a dead person.

As an engineer I like to use clean databases. Irrelevant information should have a procedure for being deleted or at the very least archived. As you said, this cleansing should have taken place a long time ago. This is a good example of bad government regulations or just incompetent people.

Good luck this November!