And speaking of positive developments in the world of elections, Assistant Secretary of State Steve Excell sends us this encouraging progress report on the statewide voter database. The new monthly update will be released tomorrow. I'll post it online as soon as I can. (Unfortunately, I'm still trying to resolve a mysterious "ORACLE data block corrupted" problem that has put my version of the database out of commission. If any Oracle DBAs are reading this and want to kibbitz, please drop me a line).

Excell's comments follow --

(1) In the January death-dupe check, about 36,000 voters with potential duplicate records were identified for further investigation by election officials. Since then, election officials have investigated and cleared/cancelled about 18,000 – or one half. Of the remaining 18,000, about 12,223 are pairs with an active record matching an inactive record.

(2) About a week ago, we asked the counties to bring on more temporary help for the “spring cleaning” effort and told them that we would pay for the extra help with HAVA funds. Many counties have done so. Sam was in Clark County this week and GOP Auditor Greg Kimsey had an Army of temps and election employees investigating dupes.

(3) We have added 5 more temp staff this week to investigate the remaining dupes. We may be adding more until we get over the hump of cleaning up the initial load of the 39 county databases. We expect the statewide VRDB to be pretty clean for the Primary and General Election if we can keep apply the manpower at both the county and state levels.

(4) With all 39 counties staff and their added temps, and our elections staff and our temps, all investigating dupes this week, the VRDB performance has been slugglish. Last night, after the close of business, we upgraded by adding more servers to handle more co-processing. We’ve also added a more robust router to the Intergovernmental Network. Today, the VRDB is performing very well with the upgrades and we are hitting it harder than ever before.

(5) Tomorrow, we’ll release the February version of the VRDB and the statistical report of the February dupe-death check. The statistical report will be posted at http://www.secstate.wa.gov/elections/vrdb/default.aspx late tomorrow. You can order a monthly subscription to the VRDB updates at https://www.secstate.wa.gov/elections/vrdb_order.aspx

(6) The WSRP asked that future VRDB CD-ROMs have the County Voter ID Number in addition to the State Voter ID Number so there is a “crosswalk” for list maintenance by the Party. The CD-ROM being released tomorrow will have both numbers. All users of the data will appreciate this change.

(7) The WSRP asked that future VRDB CD-ROMs have the voter’s voting history. When the County Election Management Systems were upgraded, some counties purged the older voter history data. We are requesting that they sneaker-net this older data to we can load it and have a minimum of a full-two-years of history at the state level. The DIMS EMS counties have been providing that data. We will keep working to get as much history as the counties have at the state level. All users of the data will appreciate this change also.

(8) We investigated the EFF’s allegation of massive numbers of double voting and found it was an EMS computer error that was doubling the number of records for each voter. We contacted the vendor and they have fixed their product. We have cleaned up the February CD-ROM.

(9) Our state data integrity team is in the midst of investigating Stefan Sharkansky’s list of potential duplicates. The CD-ROM release tomorrow will reflect some clean-up of these dupes, but not all. The next release should have the entire list investigated and resolved sometime next week.

(10) Today we had two training sessions today on the Lexis-Nexis Law Enforcement Database to investigate voter change-of-addresses, determine identities as to felon status (when two or more voters potentially match a know felon), and other useful tools so we make sure the wrong people are not voting and that we do not inadvertently cancel the voter registration of someone who is entitled to vote (i.e., minimize the cases of mistaken identity). We bought 50 seats for this database so each county could have at least one seat, as seats for our state election workers who are on the “spring clean-up” team.

(11) We will be doing the March felon check soon, but the results will not be known for 60-90 days at a minimum. This is due to the fact we must prepare a “due process” letter and mail it to each alleged felon giving them a chance (30 days) to respond in writing or to appear in person. Most of those requesting a hearing will appear before their Auditor if there is no election in progress, or before the Canvassing Board if an election is in progress. A Deputy Prosecutor will present the evidence justifying our cancelling their voter registration. Once the felon status is proven, and alleged mistaken identities resolved, the burden shifts to the felon to demonstrate his/her civil rights have been restored for each and every felony offense.

(12) We have a formal protocol in place that IF our statewide “spring clean-up” team finds any voter who actually voted twice, we will formally refer our findings to County Auditor and County Prosecutor and we will report our findings in our monthly report that is released with the CD-ROM. To date, we have not found any, but we will some day and want to be clear re how we will handle such cases.

(13) We have mailed out a letter to all voters who had a registration record lacking a birth date (pre-1971 registrants didn’t have to give one), or had a birth date that did not make sense. By mid-next week, we should start receiving responses and will be updating our records. We will conduct future mailings when we find missing information that cannot be supplied by the Auditor from their records or from the original form.

(14) If any of you find things that need follow-up investigation, please send the info to me and I will que it up for follow-up by our clean-up team. I’ve been testing the data myself and have been sending in corrections or items for follow investigation.

Please be assured we are taking the clean-up work very seriously and are dedicating the people, the tools and other resources to have the best voter registration list in the Nation.