You have to cancel your voter registration when you move?

I was under the impression that the act of registering to vote in a new state invalidated your old registration.

Christ even the DMV does that

Maybe we should simple got to a system where your voter registration automatically expires at the end of november after an election. Gives you just under two years to re up for the next one

I've moved 12 times in the last 14 years for work. I'm probably still registered in 10 states. Only WA followed up before the election and sent me a card asking me if I was still living there. It never really occurred to me to cancel voter registration. I've never voted more than one state at a time so no harm done in my case. That said, this Phillips guy is pathetic. He made up a number of supposed illegal votes, Trump liked it, and now Phillips is supposed to back it up. He's got nothing.

A few years ago when I moved to one state to another...well after I finally got around to registering about a week later I got a letter in the mail: It appears you have registered to vote in another state (lots of legaleeze).
are you:
1. different person with same name. Please call us to work out how you can be uniquely identified
2. Now a resident in state B. Please cancel my registration
3. I did not intend to change my registration. Cancel my registration in state B.

I too never unregistered. I assumed it was automatic like at he DMV as well. Heck, I registered to vote at the DMV and they had no problem canceling my NY license and replacing it with PA.

Also, my grandfather just died and I'm pretty sure canceling his voter registration wasn't on the list of things to take care of.

It's a general problem with town governments. You'd think there would be some automatic process: "hi, I moved to your town, please do whatever is needed". Forget it. You have to visit every individual office you might need something from, to register your presence; you really ought to visit all the offices at your previous residence, to undo things.

Most people don't do anything at all, until some screwed up paperwork hits them over the head.

Someone dies? If the heirs don't happen to think about sending the voter registration office a death certificate, the voter registration remains active. Anyone want to guess how many people think about that?

Fair point, there needs to be some system to ensure that a person is actively registered for Federal elections in one place only.

But that's not the voter-fraud problem.

The voter fraud problem is things like the City of Detroit, where, during the recent (ludicrous) recount effort, over 60% of the precincts could not be lawfully recounted due to (ahem) "anomalies".

Anomalies like 'more votes counted than the number of voters recorded as showing up' and 'broken seals on ballot boxes'. You know - little 'anomalies' like that.

I'm not convinced of the 3 to 5-million fraudulent votes claimed by the Trump camp. But a recent study of voter registration from Old Dominion University makes a compelling case that there may be as many as 3 million aliens registered to vote in the US, and that a million or more may have actually voted in the last election. That level of voter fraud is unacceptable.

llater,

llamas

llamas, exactly.

Dead people voting, otherwise anomalous votes -- these are things we also need to fix, because they are the big problems. I think it would be the rare person who packs up their life and moves to another state simply to vote twice.

Chances are, people believe that their vote is cancelled when they move.

I wouldn't even know how to unregister to vote. Registering is easy. But from what I pick up online unregistering looks quite painful. By comparison registering was a simple process of mailing in a standard form.

The claims that there isn't voter fraud just aren't credible. To me at least. There is no good rational reason to oppose a photo ID requirement. I'd also love to see a purple finger requirement too. Yes most fraud probably happens with mail in ballots. And I don't really know how to make those more secure. But just because you can't fix everything doesn't mean you don't fix the things you can.

Voter rolls are handled by individual states. That's why the federal term limits for Congress was overturned by the courts. Only each state can determine if a statewide official should be term limited, not the federal government (even though Congressman is technically a federal office, it is more commonly held to be a state office).

The problem comes not in the election of a state's senator or a district representative, but in the election of a president where multi-state residence can confuse things. If I winter in Arizona and summer in Minnesota and own a house in both, I am eligible to vote in both. I have legitimate concerns in both and am entitled to a voice in both.

There is no federal oversight of voter rolls to ensure that each person is registered to vote for president in only one state and votes only once. It's not a separate voter roll. There's nothing to ensure that I cannot vote with an absentee ballot in one state and at the polls in the other. After all, I'm legally registered to vote in both.

People can be, and have been, caught doing so on an individual basis, but no mechanism exists to check each state's voter rolls against other states.

That level of voter fraud is unacceptable. ~ llamas at January 31, 2017 4:39 AM

Any level is unacceptable, but some level is probably unavoidable.

Obama won North Carolina in 2012 by something like 8,000 votes. Since the president is elected state by state, it doesn't take a massive voter fraud operation to sway the election. Only a modest one in several key swing states would be needed; which also calls into question Trump's claim of millions of fraudulent votes. Why bother with that many when only a few thousand are needed.

I'm not convinced of the 3 to 5-million fraudulent votes claimed by the Trump camp.

I dunno, maybe. Depends on the states that hand out drivers licenses to anyone who can pass the tests.

Do they also hand them out to, *cough* undocumented workers? are they then also automatically registered to vote or offered voter registration forms to fill out?

How many undocumented workers are there in California 18 or older? how many were registered or thought they could vote legally because they were invited to do so?

How many times have a box of ballots turned up in the trunk of an election worker's car; a box that magically swayed the election to the Democratic candidate?

In the 2002 Washington gubernatorial election, multiple boxes of ballots were found in the trunks of election workers' cars in King County. The Republican candidate won the first two recounts, but the multiple finds of trunk ballots put the Democrat over the top on the third recount.

In the 2004 election in Ohio, a box of trunk ballots was found and rejected by election officials.

Al Franken was elected a US senator in Minnesota by 312 votes in 2008 after a protracted election recount in which a box of previously-uncounted ballots was found in the trunk of a car.

And yet, none of these election workers who put ballot boxes in their trunks and forgot them have ever been fired.

"Based on national polling by a consortium of universities, a report by [Political scientist Jesse Richman] said 6.4 percent of the estimated 20 million adult noncitizens in the U.S. voted in November."

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jan/26/hillary-clinton-received-800000-votes-from-nonciti/

Ken, If they are referring to the data set I think they are I actually heard the rebuttal from the guys who collected the original data on NPR. It essentially amounted to an Otter defense. The interviewee said that 14% of their samples claimed that they were not citizens and were registered to vote the reality is that they actually were citizens all along. Essentially his data could not be trusted. I.e. You fucked up . . . you trusted us!

Makes you wonder what other 'scientific' conclusions came out of that data set.

lujlp, in fact states would love to cancel your voter registration when they see that you've moved to another state and registered there, but it's illegal for them to do so. Some have tried it and been sued by the ACLU and other, more Democrat-leaning voting rights organisations who've forced them to keep those people registered to vote. Any suggestion of changing this is portrayed as voter suppression by the press. I even saw an article the other day spinning the number of Texas voter registrations that were suspended (much like Gregg Phillips) as proof of Republican voter suppression...

I live near DC. It is not the slightest bit unusual for people to move between VA/MD and DC in the last 4 years and still be at the same job and life. Don't even need absentee ballots, you could walk to 3 voting areas in an hour.
The system we have is laughably insecure, and one political party is doing everything possible to keep it that way.

I live in Oregon. My father-in-law received more than one Multnomah County ballot last election. He owns two houses and the state sent him a ballot at each address. We didn't believe it until he showed us. There was a similar story to this in Washington state I heard about on the Lars Larson radio show. Someone from the state SOS office said they lacked the ability to screen out duplicate registrations and people registered at more than one address. It makes you wonder how often this happens and how many actually vote more than one ballot if they receive them.

Yep, YOU, the voter, need to unregister. No one else can do it for you.

Not really a secret. But, most folks do not know about it - As shown by the number of commenters who are surprised by this news.

Here's the problem though. Any attempts to automatically unregister folks will be met with howls from the Democrats and cries of voter suppression.

Further, registering to vote is a state thing, not a federal thing. We cannot even get a national voter ID law passed; so why would the Democrats go along with automatically unregistering folks who move between states?

DANG!

Isn't it funny how people, whether it's Trump or some Democrat official, usually pick out the worst person to have to make a case?

It is oddly common Mpetrie. And they really stick with those bad examples even when you offer them better examples. People are still lying over Ferguson no matter how many times the popular story was proven false.

Here is the deal, Amy. Every single law passed in Democrat havens or proposed by Democrats has, without fail, been a law which REDUCES transparency and verification.

I am reminded of that 'Motor Voter' law in Cali, where if you got a license, you got registered. Citizenship? Pshaw! Do you need to be a CITIZEN to vote? How parochial!

So yeah, it goes a bit beyond Trumps 'worst case scenario'. California seems to not care a bit who votes in their elections. Detroit had weird election results (including more votes than registered voters) in something like 60% of their districts.

One wonders how California would fare with a close examination, but they are on the cusp of seceding, much less allowing Trump to audit their roles.

So I join you in wanting the process cleaned up. Unfortunately, I think you will find the dominant party in California would fight you tooth and nail over the issue.

Um...one doesn't need to 'move the whole family' to vote in two states.

You can vote in FLORIDA personally and swear to another state that 'Honest Injun, I won't be in the state to vote in NY' and get an absentee ballot.

Now, that presumes quite BAD motives, but let's be frank: there are only 7 competitive states, and none of them exactly do a background check on each new voter (you generally need an electric bill or something)

When you can win Florida with 537 votes...would that be sufficient incentive for a touch of party fraud?

A-random-guy: thanks for mentioning this. My dad passed away two years ago. I didn't even think of de-registering him to vote. I thought it would be automatic since I notified the state & SS. Guess I will have to look into this now.

At least where I live (California), the voter registration form has a space for your old address, so that when you register at your new home after a move, you similarly cancel your old registration. It is already a crime to fail to fill that part in if you were registered before, but I've never heard of it being enforced.

Perhaps the state should offer a bounty to people who blow the whistle on such violations, as they now do for other minor violations such as Prop 65. Cheats and greedy lawyers deserve one another, don't you think?

Of course, we could also look for methods that work better without extra effort. One would be to have people register to vote on page 1 of their tax return, as they do in Canada. (Canada's tax return is also the application for welfare benefits, so everyone files one even if they don't have income.)