110 Year Olds Voting Update

This is an update to the first blog about the possibility of 110 year olds voting in NC.

After reading Don Wright’s (attorney for the State Board of Elections) email to Joyce McCloy of the NC Coalition for Verified Voting, I sent him an email to get some clarification on the points he made.  I informed him that Ms. McCloy had copied his email and posted it in the Civitas Review Blog and I included a link to the blog so that he could take a look at our conversation.

Ms. McCloy is satisfied with Mr. Wright’s explanation of 110 year olds on the official voter rolls.   Me? I believe that just because something sounds reasonable doesn’t necessarily make it correct.  That is why I went back to the data to try to verify Mr. Wright’s claims.  Voter data can be found on the State Board of Elections ftp site for anyone to use (voter registration data ftp://www.app.sboe.state.nc.us/data) or absentee data (ftp://www.app.sboe.state.nc.us/enrs).

I downloaded the latest absentee file and found that 3,315 of 110 year old voters voted early in the last election and 3,090 of those voters voted in 2008 (they were 108 years old at the time).  The data would indicate that these voters’ records are not getting updated at the polling place as Mr. Wright claimed when he wrote, “If these voters show up to vote, the poll workers inquire as to their correct birth date and that information is added.” 

I went a little further in my research to find that there are over 19,000 voters whose age reflects the number 110 in Cumberland, Guilford, Forsyth and Davidson counties.  So much for Mr. Wright’s assertion that:  “Since that time, we have be (sic) able to reduce the number of such voters down to a little over two thousand.”

And, I hope Mr. Wright got it wrong when he wrote “When a county does not have a birth date for a voter, they use a default date for that voters birth date and most counties use 1/1/1900.”  Surely, if a county does not have a birth date, the county’s procedure would be to put the registration aside until it could be determined that the voter was at least 18 years old.

Yes Apokalupsis, dead people can vote in NC and our voting system would protect them.  The State Board of Elections has partnered with the Legislature and other progressive/liberal groups for the past 20 years to bring us to this place.  They have been busy passing legislation that makes it easier for everyone to vote while never addressing ballot security (see same-day registration, pre-registration, reversals in HAVA and NVRA requirements).

I emailed Mr. Wright yesterday morning and have not heard back from him yet, but when I do I will report back with his response.