6.9 Million Multiple Voters on Roles in 28 States

Gaming the System

Some 6.9 million Americans are registered to vote in two or more states, according to a report obtained by Watchdog.org.

“Sensible approaches to roll maintenance are fought tooth and nail by radical special interests who can use the duplicity in the system to their advantage", says Catherine Engelbrecht, president of the election-watch group True The Vote. The cross-check program involves only 28 states and does not include the three largest: California, Texas and Florida.

“Duplicate registration is an open invitation to voting fraud,” said Clara Belle Wheeler, a member of the Election Board in Albemarle County, Va. “This ability to vote more than once dilutes the legal votes and changes the results of elections.” The interstate cross-check program matches first and last names and dates of birth to identify multiple registrations.But the data are not routinely used to purge duplicates.

“Increasingly lax standards in our election process produce increasingly unreliable results,” Engelbrecht asserted.

“The few conversations that are had about how to shore up these weaknesses are immediately seized on by certain politicians and special-interest groups as fuel to further divide American voters based on trumped-up race and class-based narratives...." 

"The vicious cycle can be fixed if citizens wake up, stand up and refuse to settle for a broken system." 

SBE officials, who provided the cross-check data in response to a Freedom of Information Act filing by the Virginia Voters Alliance, did not respond to Wheeler’s assertion. 

Two national voting-rights groups — the League of Women Voters and America Votes — did not respond to Watchdog’s requests for comment.