Nevada’s active voter rolls in flux

Nevada's active voter rolls include some very inactive dead residents, people registered to vote in more than one state, and thousands who have moved and never bothered to tell election officials.

Nationwide, up to 24 million active voter registrations are no longer valid or accurate, according to a report released today by Pew Center on the States. It estimates 1.8 million "deceased individuals" populate voter rolls and another
2.7 million have active registrations in two states or more.

Election officials such as Larry Lomax, the Clark County registrar of voters, constantly scrub voter lists to keep them current. Nevada and seven other states this week launched a shared database to make the job easier, more efficient and more accurate with records updated every 30 days.

"We do what we can to keep our records as accurate as possible," Lomax said . "It's a very transient county, and people are moving and dying all the time."

Although nonpartisan election officials keep tabs on voters, the political implications grow more important in election years. In 2012, the presidency is at stake as the Democratic and Republican parties compete to register more people so they can get the most supporters to the polls.

In 2008, Democrats gained a 100,000-plus active voter advantage over Republicans in Nevada after attracting new voters that helped Barack Obama win the White House. Now, that advantage has narrowed to about 47,500 after the voter rolls were updated last year.

In December, Lomax moved 63,582 registered Clark County voters from the "active" list to "inactive" because their current addresses couldn't be verified.

This month, his office plans to mail every one of the county's 720,000 active voters a new registration card. He expects about 10 percent to be returned as undeliverable. That could put another estimated 70,000 voters on "inactive" status.

If those inactive voters don't cast a ballot during two federal elections in a row -- 2012 and then 2014 -- they will be removed from the rolls and would have to reregister to vote, he said.

In Clark County, keeping voter lists current is challenging. Each month, several thousand people move into and out of Las Vegas, and more than 1,000 residents die, according to health officials.

As of January, nearly 1.1 million of Nevada's 2.7 million residents were registered to vote: 447,881 Democrats, 400,310 Republicans, 172,463 nonpartisan and the remainder third parties.

Lomax said his office uses many sources to determine when to activate a voter and when to cancel someone's registration. Every two weeks, Clark County gets a report from the secretary of state's office listing people who have died. Sometimes a spouse or relative will call to report the news.

Very few people notify election officials when they move, he said. When a person applies for a driver's license in another state or registers to vote elsewhere, that state might notify Nevada, but it's hit or miss, Lomax said. His office runs name checks against the national change of address service, which results in lists of voters who have moved -- either within the Silver State or outside Nevada. His office then mails postcards asking them to update their addresses.

In December alone, Lomax said his office mailed out 77,000 such postcards.

Under the new database system, Nevada will share voter information with seven other states: Colorado, Delaware, Maryland, Oregon, Utah, Virginia and Washington, according to the Pew Center on the States. Pew organized the project and hopes to expand it to other states.

The database will tap voter registration records as well as those with the Department of Motor Vehicles, where new residents often pop up as they apply for a state driver's license. A 1993 federal law also allows people to register to vote at the same time in DMV offices.

The Social Security "death index" also will be part of the database, according to Pew.

Pew and Nevada officials said they haven't detected any fraud in examining voter lists.

"We regularly maintain Nevada's voter registration database, and no glaring deficiencies in our voter rolls have been identified," said Scott Gilles, Nevada's deputy secretary of state for elections.

"Currently, there is no ability to cross-reference voter registration records state-by-state, which would be very beneficial in identifying inconsistencies and cleaning up our voter rolls," he added, saying that's why Nevada agreed to be a "leading partner" in the Pew project.