Joyce Moore said she never thought something like that would happen to her.
“I was always so diligent,” she said.
Still, though Moore has voted in every election in the 40-plus years she’s lived at her current address, and though she has worked as a judge and a clerk at the polls on Election Day, when she recently tried to confirm her voter registration online, it could not be found.
“My record was not there. My record had been purged,” she said.
Fortunately, Moore said she caught the error in time to re-register by Indiana’s Oct. 11 deadline.
Indiana Secretary of State Connie Lawson has released statements in recent weeks explaining that some voters’ first names and dates of birth have been changed in the state’s system, though it’s not clear how. Lawson says the investigation has been turned over to the Indiana State Police and she’s working to let impacted voters know they will still be able to vote on Election Day.
A statement about the investigation from ISP Supt. Doug Carter said the reports from Lawson “may serve as evidence of forgery by representatives associated with the Indiana Voter Registration Project,” an effort by a group called Patriot Majority USA that claims to have registered roughly 45,000 voters in Indiana, mostly African-Americans, since May.
ISP raided IVRP’s Meridian Street office in Indianapolis on Oct. 4 as part of an investigation that spans 56 Indiana counties and began in August, after concerns in Hendricks and Marion counties that some of the voter registration applications turned in by the Project were fraudulent.
Since the raid, civil rights groups and leaders across the country have expressed grave concern about the way the investigation has been handled.
Georgia State Rep. Stacey Abrams, who founded the New Georgia Project in 2014 that set out to register people of color, said the effort started with the support of Georgia’s secretary of state but quickly turned sour.
“Once we were found to be effective, once we’d turned in tens of thousands of applications, we were accused of voter fraud,” Abrams said. “This is a very common practice that is often intended to suppress and has a chilling effect on a voter registration drive.
“The tactic of first accuse, then obfuscate, then scare is not uncommon. Indiana has taken a more egregious process than we faced.”
Abrams said voter registration drives, which are “critical to engaging communities of color and low-income communities,” are often put in an impossible spot.
“Registration drives are required by law to turn in every single form they receive. You are not allowed to cherry-pick your voters,” she said. “This creates an unlawful double-bind: If you turn in a flawed application, you’re committing fraud, and if you don’t turn in an application, you are committing another crime.”
It’s unclear how many of the applications IVRP collected had flaws, but Abrams said it’s common for flawed applications to be submitted.
“On average roughly 20 percent of applications submitted will have some flaw — some intentional, some accidental, some incomplete,” she said. “The appropriate response … would be to process those forms that are valid on their face, and then to investigate only those that are invalid, and only then if you see a pattern of who’s turning those forms in and the invalid information would you then investigate the source of that problem.”
The involvement of the police in the investigation has been cause for concern for many. Ben Jealous, immediate past president and CEO of the NAACP, called the raid “an outrageous use of state police.”
“(It was) the most aggressive actions we’ve seen by state police, we in the civil rights community, in a very long time,” he said.
Bill Buck, speaking on behalf of Patriot Majority USA, said this type of police involvement is not common.
“It’s pretty much unprecedented for state police to raid a voter registration project like this,” he said.
Chad Dunn, an attorney who has traveled the country to speak on issues of voter protection and civil rights, said voter fraud is extremely rare, and he’s disturbed by how the investigation in Indiana has played out.
“People are much more likely to be struck by lightning than to have a fraudulent ballot cast in Indiana,” he explained. “The notion that the state would come forward with police officers and serve search warrants, as if people who are exercising their own constitutional right to register and engage other citizens are involved in a criminal enterprise, is, frankly, embarrassing. The state ought to be called to account for it.”
People who work to register voters, Dunn said, might make mistakes.
“But a mistake made by someone who’s trying to engage in the democratic process is entirely different than criminal activity that ought to bring on the attention of the state. … The state has an obligation to protect the integrity of elections; there’s no question about it. But we don’t amputate our arm when we need a Band-Aid on our hand.”
As for the 45,000 applications, there are questions as to where they are now. ISP said they took only copies of applications during the raid. Valerie Warycha, a spokeswoman for Lawson’s office, says to her knowledge, the applications have been turned in to their corresponding county offices and have been processed. Buck said it’s not so clear-cut.
“We have no idea what they’ve done with those registrations,” Buck said. “We don’t know how many were turned over, how many they flagged. None of this is transparent.”
Buck said anyone who filled out a registration application through the Project should try to cast a ballot, in case their registration did go through as planned. Anyone who has an issue at the polls can call the Election Protection Hotline at 866-OUR-VOTE.
Looking beyond this year’s election, Chris Melody Fields, with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (the group that runs the Election Protection Hotline), said this situation should prompt Indiana to evaluate its current voter registration procedures.
“Several states already provide same-day registration through the early voting period or on Election Day. There are efforts to create automatic voter registration system that will remove the burden from voters,” Fields said. “This is a critical moment for Indiana, and this is a time for the state to look within and move forward with modernized voter registration.”
