More than 10,000 Virginia felons still on the voting rolls

(AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)

Another “anomaly” has shown up in Virginia’s electoral process. The problem currently under examination started more than a decade ago when the state moved to relax the rules making some felons ineligible to vote after having been convicted. Under those less strict rules, eligible felons could have their voting rights reinstated. There’s nothing wrong with that if that’s how the voters of Virginia want to handle it. But the new system contained what probably should have been a glaring oversight. There was no mechanism put in place to once again remove those people from the voter rolls if they went on to be convicted of another felony. A recent investigation revealed that this situation led to more than 10,500 felons who should have been ineligible remaining on the rolls and able to vote. (Virginia Mercury)

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Another data glitch in Virginia’s election system caused 10,558 felons to remain on the voter rolls after they committed new crimes that should’ve made them ineligible to vote, state officials announced Friday.

The Virginia Department of Elections said it discovered the issue while conducting list maintenance as the agency prepares to replace the state’s aging voter system.

The affected voter registrations involve people with felony convictions who had their rights restored by governors as Virginia dramatically relaxed its lifetime disenfranchisement policy over the last decade.

This was reportedly caused by a problem in the computer code used in Virginia’s aging election records system. The state claims that a fix for this issue has been developed and the ineligible voters will soon be removed from the rolls. A new system is scheduled to be deployed over the next two years. (Just in time for the presidential election. What could possibly go wrong?)

Virginia election officials are claiming that “only” approximately one thousand ineligible voters actually voted, but they don’t sound terribly sure about that number. What if a majority of the ineligible felons really did vote? The race for Virginia’s second congressional district was won by barely 10,000 votes. The seventh district was similarly close. And there were obviously some county and municipal races decided by an even smaller number.

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The part of this that’s harder for me to understand is how so much of the process was handed off to a piece of software and automated. When a person is found guilty of a qualifying felony, shouldn’t one of the steps in that process be to send a note to the appropriate election official instructing them to remove the person from the rolls?

This is one argument that we’ve been making here for years every time the subject of mail-in voting comes up. Adding all of these complications to the voting process simply opens the door to problems, not least of which is the fact that so many states’ voting rolls are such a mess. Dead people remain on the rolls for years, as do people who have moved out of the state. And now we’re finding out that disqualified felons show up on the rolls as well.

Too many states are unwilling or unable to clean up their voter rolls and keep them clean. It took the state of Washington years to accomplish this feat after they moved to all mail-in voting. We’re witnessing a hot debate across the country these days concerning the integrity of elections and people’s faith in the reliability of the electoral process. Issues like the one being seen in Virginia are certainly not helping to settle that argument.

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