Ninety percent of eligible county voters registered

There are 51,102 names on the Cape Girardeau County voter rolls and more postcard registrations to be processed, but election officials said they aren't seeing any of the issues that have raised concerns and caused fraud investigations to be launched in Kansas City, Mo., and other locations around the country.

By midday Friday, said Sherri Lomedico, voter registration clerk in the Cape Girardeau County clerk's office, the job of entering the names had caught up with the registration cards received in the mail Wednesday. She said she still had a 10-inch-high stack of cards in the Jackson office and another 10-inch-high stack in the Cape Girardeau office.

The voter rolls include 5,300 names of voters considered inactive -- people who have missed at least one federal election but who are still on the rolls as required by federal law.

The number on the rolls represents about 90 percent of the 56,000 Cape Girardeau County residents age 18 and older, a number based on the U.S. Census Bureau 2006 population estimates for the county.

Keeping duplicate registrations under control when people move from place to place has been made much easier by the Missouri Centralized Voter Registration database, Lomedico said. When a new name is entered into the county's computer, it is checked instantly against all the other counties of the state. When a match is found based on name and other distinct identifying information such as the last four digits of a Social Security number, a driver's license number or a birth date, the registration is removed from the county where the person lived previously, she said.

"It happens right away," Lomedico said. "It is taken from them to ours so they are not on their rolls any more at all."

In the latest investigation of voter registration problems in the Kansas City area, the verification process worked as intended and the problem applications were identified before they were entered into the database, Secretary of State Robin Carnahan said in a news release.

Along with checking the name against current registrations, the voter database incorporates other databases to see if the name matches actual distinct identifiers, said Lara Egerdal, spokeswoman for Carnahan. "It flags you, and rather than putting that registration in the system it calls you a pending incomplete. If you want to get on the rolls on Election Day we need some confirmable information."

The state also has reciprocal agreements with eight other nearby states to cross-check voter registrations so voters moving across state lines are registered in a single location, Egerdal said.

Keeping voter rolls clean also requires regular removal of names of people who have moved from a jurisdiction. In Bollinger County, the voter rolls were decreased from 9,154 names to 7,875 from 2004 to 2006. When that action was reported earlier this week in the Southeast Missourian, Clerk Diane Holzum said it generated a large number of calls from outside her county questioning the action.

This year, Bollinger County has 8,312 names on the voter rolls, including 270 inactive voters.

Federal law sets strict standards for who can and cannot be removed from the registration rolls, Holzum said. The rules include placing the voter's name on an inactive list after they miss a federal election, which takes place in November of even-numbered years. The voter must miss two more federal elections and not respond to attempts to notify them for verification of their address before they can be removed.

Holzum said she has conformed to federal law and works hard to keep voter registration lists accurate and full. "I feel, like any election official, that that is what I am here for," she said. "My only goal is to ensure it is accurate. I am not here to keep people from voting."

The state database is part of attempts to comply with federal law and Carnahan's office helps local election authorities understand when they can and can't remove names from the registration rolls, Egerdal said. "One of the things we want to do is have clean voter rolls," she said. "Federal law, which all election authorities follow, tells local election authorities what they must do before removing names."

rkeller@semissourian.com

388-3642

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