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State making progress in trimming voter rolls

By RUSTY MARKS

The State Journal

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner said county clerks are doing a good job speeding up the process of purging the state’s voter rolls.

“Thanks to a cooperative effort between state and local officials, voter roll cleanup has already produced dramatic results,” Warner said. “In just six months, clerks have cancelled 64,473 outdated and improper voter files. That includes 1,601 felons who, while under conviction, lost their right to vote, and over 6,300 deceased individuals.”

When he took office in January 2017, Warner said he would coordinate with the state’s 55 county clerks to try to streamline the process of updating county voter rolls.

The effort appears to be paying off. State Election Director Donald Kersey said new computerized notifications sent to county clerks have gone a long way in speeding up the process.

According to state voting records, 64,473 voter registrations have been cancelled or taken off the voting rolls so far in 2017. That compares with 31,363 voters taken off the rolls in 2016, 45,395 in 2015, 28,542 in 2014, 42,155 in 2013 and 26,212 in 2012.

Kersey said there are only a few reasons someone may have a registration cancelled. A voter may move to another county or state and not tell election officials of the move, creating the possibility of a voter voting in two different places.

Voters also may die, leaving it up to election officials to remove them from the voting rolls. Or someone may be convicted of a felony, making him ineligible to vote until his sentence is complete.

Kersey said a few voters also have asked their voter registrations be cancelled, some because of a commission set up by President Donald Trump to look into allegations of voter fraud around the country.

Kersey said the state has made progress in reporting and removing ineligible voters since Warner took office.

He said state corrections officials used to send out lists of convicted felons, but, “prior to us, it wasn’t done on a regular basis.” Kersey said corrections officials now send out a monthly list of newly-convicted felons that automatically pings county clerks to let them know someone from their county has been convicted.

County clerks now also are regularly notified of voters in their counties who have died.

In the past, it was up to county election officials to figure out which voters were deceased. Kersey said one county clerk went through the obituaries every day looking for deceased voters.

“Imagine that on a statewide platform,” Kersey said. “That’s how they used to have to do it.”

West Virginia is now hooked up to an interstate database that keeps track of voters moving from state to state, as well.

Cabell County led the way with voter cancellations in 2017, with 7,406 people taken off the voter rolls. So far this year, Cabell County also has registered 1,141 new voters.

Berkely County has removed 6,852 voters so far in 2017, while registering 2,110. Raleigh County removed 4,659 voter registrations, while Harrison County removed 3,890.

Some southern counties, which have historically had problems with voter irregularities, also saw significant numbers of voters removed from the voting lists in 2017. Logan County has removed 3,229 voters from the rolls so far this year. Lincoln County only removed 477 voters in 2017, but culled 5,088 registrations in 2016.

But county clerks in Logan and Lincoln counties think removing more voter registrations in recent years has less to do with voter fraud and more to do with past neglect.

“It’s been a mess,” said Lincoln County Clerk Direl Baker, now in his second term as county clerk. He said it has taken Lincoln County election officials several years to clean up the county’s voter rolls.

Logan County Clerk John Turner, on the job for 10 years, said he has tried to stay on top of the county’s voter lists. “We’ve been on top of this from the beginning,” he said. “I have great staff.

“Mac Warner, he’s hands-on like me,” he said.

Kersey said election officials have so far convicted one person of voter fraud in the state. Election officials also have found more than a few voting anomalies that turned out to be due to errors by election officials.

But Kersey can’t say if there has been evidence of significant voter fraud in the state. Election officials are prohibited by law from discussing any investigation until the investigation has been resolved.

“We do have irregularities that we’re looking into,” he said. “Of course we’re concerned about even one instance of voter fraud.”

Warner thinks accurate voter records will go a long way toward limiting the possibility of election fraud.

“Each improper registration that is removed is one less opportunity for an irregularity or impropriety in voting to occur,” he said. “We’ve proven that we can make great strides in cleaning up our voter files when we work together with our county clerks. We still have a lot of work to do, and I’m confident that we’ll get the job done.”

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