Centralization and Control of Election Management

Brought to You by the Party in Power

By Greg Moses

While we study Texas efforts to produce a statewide database of voters by Jan. 1, other states have breaking news on the issue, too. The move to centralize voter registration in all 50 states is being accompanied by Republican-led efforts to centralize election powers and tighten up voter identification.

In Florida, a House committee has approved a law that would create an “election czar” in the office of Secretary of State. As Dara Kam reports for the Palm Beach Post, the proposed law would give the Secretary of State, “the authority to interpret election law for county supervisors of elections in situations such as a statewide recount, as well as sole control over a statewide voter database.”

Indiana will soon have “the nation’s strictest voter identification requirement” reports the NorthWest Indiana Times. The bill passed by party-line votes in both houses of the General Assembly, with Republicans in favor. A UPI story on Wednesday says Georgia and Wisconsin are also headed in the strict ID direction, following five states already there: Hawaii, Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina and South Dakota.*

And where do you think the following sentence comes from? “The plan is to have one central database housed on a server in Texas”? It’s from an editorial at the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette in Indiana.

The Texas location of the server worries county officials in Indiana. “They want to know what will happen if the server in Texas can’t handle Election Day traffic when every county is trying to access data.” And therefore, they want permission from the Indiana Secretary of State to keep a copy of their voter rolls in the county. Says the Journal-Gazette editorial board: it is a reasonable request.

“The policy decision hasn’t been decided yet,” says Bill McCully of Quest Information Systems (QUESTIS) in a phone conversation with the Texas Civil Rights Review. So how did the Indiana voter database come to reside in Texas?

“It’s not much of a story,” McCully chuckles. Quest has a good relationship with hosting service, Data Return, which is headquartered on trendy Las Colinas Blvd. in the Dallas suburb of Irving. “They are world renowned, fully bunkerized, and have a service level that Quest likes.” In the cyber age of information flow, says McCully, “the physical location of data isn’t all that relevant.”

The Indianapolis firm is developing FirstTuesday software in partnership with Microsoft. Quest is lead vendor for the Indiana voter registration system and partner with Unisys for a Virginia system. “The base software for the HAVA database will be coming out in a couple or three chunks in the next three weeks or so,” says McCully.

In California, Gov. Schwarzenegger has successfully secured legislative approval to appoint new Secretary of State Bruce McPherson, who will oversee the HAVA mandated database and, yes of course, completely eliminate the partisanship and favoritism of his Democratic predecessor.

From Ghana and Malaysia also come stories that show up under a Google News search for “voter database.” The Ghanian Chronicle editorializes in favor of a national ID system because the database would help keep foreigners out of protected businesses and also be useful as a tool for voter registration.

In Malaysia we can see the future coming. They have a national ID system with 20 million fingerprints on file, enabling 12,000 searches per day to confirm that people are who they say. The story about AFIS (or Automated Fingerprint ID Systems) doesn’t say where Malaysia keeps its server. Makes us want to fiddle with a Lyle Lovett song: “That’s right, it’s not in Texas, but Texas wants it anyway!”

With the trajectory of technology and power pretty clearly headed in the direction of databases, whether Texas-based or not, progressives will need a better slogan than STOP! So here’s what we propose: no identification without registration. Probably that needs to go to Jim Hightower for a rewrite, but the idea is that if the state is going to be able to database everyone, then it ought to abolish the need for voter registration altogether. To Be is to be Registered to Vote. And yes, that means prisoners, too.

Note: *list of Photo ID states corrected Apr. 2.