Motor-Voter Law Overstuffs the Rolls

On June 22, Indiana officials mailed an odd postcard to 202,268 registered voters.

One side featured a picture of a man and woman who appeared to have no mouths, and the query, “Will you have a say?” The other side was downright existential, asking voters in a roundabout way the following:

Who aren’t you?

Where don’t you live?

The intent was to clear up confusion created by Indiana’s version of the motor-voter law. Every person who received the unusual postcard had registered to vote at least twice, some of them three, four and five times.

Ridding the rolls of the duplicate names has been a Sisyphean task. The June mailing was the second attempt, at a cost so far of about $900,000--nearly the annual budget of the office involved, the Indiana Elections Division.

When a paltry 25,000 postcards were returned, officials considered it a resounding success.

The confusion is apparent in the voting numbers. Total registration is way up--to 4 million, in a state of 6 million people--but election day turnout is down. In fact, on Nov. 7, the percentage of adults eligible to vote who actually cast ballots fell to a record low of 49.5%, according to the secretary of state’s office.

And while many voters are on the rolls more than once, others can’t seem to get registered at all. They have found out--too late--that they had only applied to register.

Perhaps no tale illustrates the bureaucratic quagmire more vividly than the ordeal of Judith Weinheimer, a recent arrival from New York. It took the involvement of one gubernatorial appointee, one county registrar, at least three attorneys and more than 30 phone calls for her to vote.

“I was stunned at the system,” she said. “I was really, really upset. But I was going to vote.”

Weinheimer applied for a driver’s license at a Bureau of Motor Vehicles office on Sept. 23 and, as far as she knew, registered to vote. The clerk handed Weinheimer a receipt and urged her to hold onto it. Unfortunately, the clerk stapled to the receipt the part of the application that was supposed to go to the Lake County Board of Elections, the body that actually processes registration forms.

On election day, when her name was not registered at her polling place, Weinheimer whipped out her receipt, aware that under Indiana law it assured her the right to vote. The poll worker, who was not so attuned to voters’ rights, told her no, she could not.

Weinheimer went straight to the polling chief, who agreed that the motor vehicles bureau had erred. “But you still can’t vote,” Weinheimer was told.

Flustered and angry, she went to her job at her brother’s law firm. Her brother eyed her paperwork and said she was in the right. Weinheimer returned to the polling place but was rebuffed again. Then, she climbed her way, telephonically, up the state bureaucracy in Indianapolis.

Governor-appointed officials, aided by their lawyers, agreed she was legal. Poll workers still said no. Weinheimer drove seven miles to the courthouse, where once again her cause drew support.

It was cold and dark by the time Weinheimer arrived for the last time at her local poll. Ten hours after she had begun her day, she was ushered to a booth and marked her ballot.

“Really, no one understood what was going on,” she said. “No one.”

Another difficulty facing the state is that invalid registrations have become difficult to purge. A check of the list turns up an Indianapolis man who died in 1994 and a woman named Kim who moved to Los Angeles in 1997.

The system became snagged in 1995, when Indiana’s 92 counties stopped maintaining the voter rolls and turned the job over to the state. Names that had been purged after four years now sat on the lists four years before the purging process could even begin. Getting them off the lists takes at least eight additional years.