With Republican efforts percolating in Lansing to keep much closer tabs on voting lists, particularly those used by absentee voters, an old story by Crain’s Detroit Business is making the rounds in cyberspace.
The headline: Detroit has more registered voters than residents of voting age.
There are about 560,000 registered voters in the city of Detroit. But the 2010 U.S. Census found only 523,430 Detroiters over 18, according to Data Driven Detroit.
Obviously, that’s a problem.
Detroit’s voter rolls have been plagued by duplicate, incorrect or invalid registrations for a long time, and bringing the lists into compliance is a Herculean task, according to Crain’s.
“Because of the National Voter Registration Act (of 1983), we are required to hold onto and include in our count those who more than likely be should cancelled because they have moved, relocated and the like, or there has been no activity for a number of years,” City Clerk Janice Winfrey told Crain’s in August. “… We have to hold them for two consecutive federal elections. So after this federal election, by the beginning of 2013, we’ll have nearly 30,000 we can cancel.”
In other circumstances, federal law only allows local election officials to purge a name from the voter rolls when notified by the individual or a reliable source of information (such as a death certificate) that the person is no longer eligible to vote in that district — or if a voter registration card is returned as undeliverable by the U.S. Postal Service.
Detroit Director of Elections Daniel Baxter said that his department has been working with the health department and local newspapers to get accurate information about deaths. (Neither dying nor moving automatically purges a voter from the rolls, unless, in the case of the latter, the former resident receives a new driver’s license – and voter registration – in another jurisdiction.)
