A centralized voter verification process to improve security and reliability in the current U.S. voter registration system

Abstract

The current voter registration system in the United States is vulnerable to registration fraud because of three major problems: the potential registration of ineligible voters, multiple active registrations of the same voter, and the difficulty of maintaining clean voter lists. These problems arise due to the system's inability to verify a voter's registration eligibility. The impact of these problems extends beyond the inaccuracy of the election result. It has caused non U.S. citizen immigrants who have mistakenly registered to vote to be in jeopardy of deportation. This paper proposes a Centralized Voter Verification Module (CV2M) to address these problems. The CV2M bridges the Election Division with the Social Security Administration (SSA), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Department of Justice (DOJ). Data sharing and communication with these federal agencies are essential to help the Election Division in verifying registration eligibility and maintaining accurate voter lists. This paper describes the integration of the CV2M with the current registration system. It focuses on the conceptual database design and the data security of the CV2M. The integration of the new model will lead to the redesign of four core tasks in voter registration system-registering voters, verifying registration eligibility, ensuring a single active registration for each voter, and maintaining clean voter lists. An assessment of the CV2M is drawn from a discussion of strengths and weaknesses of the newly designed task flows. This paper also identifies some of the political, financial, and integration issues that arise when attempting to implement the module.