In the last few weeks, nearly 70,000 registered voters in one state were tagged as inactive due to a presumably brief “IT” error. In another state, officials disclosed that voter registration applications from what amounted to hundreds of thousands of people submitted through an online portal during the last year hadn’t been processed because of missing data records, creating a sudden logjam near Election Day.
What would you think if the two states were New Jersey and Oregon?
And what would you think if they were Louisiana and Texas?
The reality is that they’re the latter pair. A Louisiana state election official told Declare that a human error during routine maintenance by IT workers on Monday “caused the job to inadvertently classify approximately 67,000 voters statewide as inactive.”
“Our staff immediately identified the issue and began correcting it. We also implemented additional safeguards to prevent this from happening again. All affected records have been corrected,” added Deputy Secretary of State Trey Williams.
In Texas, as reported by the Dallas Morning News in late September, “State elections officials were working to determine the number of unsent records and transfer them to counties . . . It could amount to tens of thousands of files for some of Texas’ largest counties, said Sam Taylor, public affairs director for the Texas Association of County Election Officials.” The Morning News pegged the current number as “at least 590,000” in a story published on Monday. (18.6 million voters were registered in Texas for the November 2024 elections.)
These two problems range from the minor to the major sides of the spectrum. In an even wider context, they show that “mistakes happen,” sometimes in red states and sometimes in blue states, and that fallible people and computer programs are to blame.
New Jersey governor Mikie Sherrill said Wednesday that the state’s ongoing review of alleged software issues, which resulted in 6,600-plus motor vehicle commission customers being erroneously categorized as citizens, found another 1,000 instances of potentially ineligible registrations dating back to 2016. They related to age and criminal eligibility, not citizenship status. Sherrill said that the state is implementing a new, automatic comparison of MVC data with voter registration records (New Jersey has automatic voter registration through its vehicle division).
The Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles reported a similar matter of “clerical, technical, and policy errors that resulted in 1,952 individuals being registered to vote who did not provide proof of their eligibility,” earlier this year.
One might use the New Jersey and Oregon examples to criticize automatic voter registration as a policy. But the nature of the errors itself isn’t unique to noncitizen voting, or about attempted voter fraud of any kind. It’s about an ancient line: “To err is human,” updated to add, “as well as digital.”
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