UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — With voter registration deadlines fast approaching around the country, Penn State News spoke with Chris Fowler, associate professor of geography and demography at Penn State, about his research into the nation’s voter rolls.

Fowler, who served on the Centre County Board of Elections, studies the way our choices about geographic boundaries shape observable outcomes, such as the shape of electoral districts. He is currently part of a team of researchers studying the systems used to upkeep voter rolls in the U.S. With faculty in political science and sociology, the team examines how partisan control of election boards differentially affects who gets removed from voter lists and how this varies geographically and by critical socio-economic characteristics of registered voters, like age, race and income.

Q: The term “voter fraud” has been thrown around heavily since the last election cycle, and the rhetoric around “fraud” and “illegal voting” has continued into this one. What does that term actually mean?

Fowler: Federal election crimes fall into three broad categories: campaign finance crimes, like when a candidate accepts campaign donations from a foreign power; civil rights violations, like when voters are intimidated, threatened or coerced at the polls; and voter fraud, when someone illegally casts a vote in the name of someone else. 

I should be clear right out of the gate, the number of voter fraud cases in this country is not statistically significant enough to have any impact on a federal election. If we look at the last presidential election, in 2020, there were fewer than 475 potential instances voter fraud out of more than 25 million votes cast in six states. A number that small would not even come close to changing the outcome of an election.

In fact, the dominant narrative in a lot of those cases was that people were committing voter fraud to show that it was possible. It was technically possible, but they were caught and prosecuted, so that part of our system worked. Another class of individuals thought they were eligible and were stopped. What we have no evidence of is any sort of concerted effort to alter the outcome of an election through fraudulent voting. One of the best parts about serving on the Board of Elections was seeing how effective the systems are at accounting for every single vote that gets tabulated. While we don’t know who someone voted for, we are 100% able to link every vote to a registered voter.

Q: If voter fraud isn’t actually a national problem, why are we talking about it?

Fowler: A lot of the concern about “voter fraud” is actually related to who is on the voter rolls, which is a real problem. We want people who are eligible vote to be registered and to have the opportunity to vote when an election comes along. For this reason we want our list of voters to be inclusive.

The concern stems from there being names on voter rolls of people who've moved away or have died. We don’t want those names on the voter list, but it is often hard to be sure if the name on the list is one that should be removed; it could be someone with the same name or someone who has moved away temporarily but has legally retained their place of residence here. Removing them is disenfranchisement and something to be avoided. That tension, between wanting people to exercise their right to vote and wanting to have accurate records about eligibility, is what is really at the heart of this discussion, I think.

It's your civic responsibility to vote and it’s your civic responsibility to register to vote, but you are not required to notify any election officials that you’ve moved or died. We don’t have any federal system to track what happens to people after they register and so the decision to be inclusive or exclusive comes down to county election administrators.

So, the choice becomes, do you want to clean up the voter rolls to say they reflect only the people who are registered and currently living in your district but risk eligible voters showing up on election day and being turned away — or do you want keep the voter rolls as they are and risk the chance that someone votes who shouldn’t?

Q: How does a voter become listed as inactive? How do different states handle inactive voters who want to vote?

Fowler: In Pennsylvania, if you don't vote in two national elections in a row, you're listed as inactive. If you don’t vote in the next one, you get a postcard request to verify your registration. If you don’t respond to that, you're legally allowed to be taken off the rolls. This is true with some variation across the country. So, you basically have at least five years to participate in a national election, and if you don’t, you can’t vote. You can re-register, but we don’t have same day registration in most states, so if you are removed from the rolls without your knowledge and show up to vote, you will be turned away unless you live in one of the few states with same day registration.

Some states are making dramatic changes to their voter rolls. Take Texas, for example, which recently purged voter rolls of 1.2 million people. Over the past year, North Carolina county election boards removed over 700,000 voters from the state's rolls.

On the other hand, there are states like Pennsylvania, which have automatic voter registration, which means you are automatically registered to vote when you interact with government agencies like the DMV. The idea is that people should have to opt out of being on the voter rolls, because it’s viewed as a right of American citizenship.

The more people you have on the rolls, the larger the likelihood that some of those people move or die and make your rolls less accurate. So, yes, there are states with voter rolls that are a mess, but it doesn’t mean that people are cheating; it just means their voter rolls are a mess.

Q: How could we fix this problem?

Fowler: Reasonable people would agree that we need more accurate voter rolls. The way to do that is with a nationalized system, which would share information between states to update rolls when people move. The good thing is that system already exists.

ERIC, the Electronic Registration Information Center, was created in 2012 to address this problem of keeping voter rolls clean. It’s a multi-state system that automatically links registrations between states. So, let’s say you’re a registered voter who moves from Minnesota to Pennsylvania; ERIC would alert election officials in Minnesota to remove you from the rolls.

This system was put in place by election officials in States as politically diverse as Maryland and Utah with 33 member states at its peak. It was a bipartisan program, and it worked really well when there was this shared national goal of fixing the voter rolls. The issue was that it eventually became politicized. Inaccurate voter rolls provide a perception of fraud and that perception of fraud became politically useful to people trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Over the past two years, nine states have left ERIC, dropping the membership from 33 states plus Washington, D.C., to 24 states plus D.C. There is no reason for this decline, and it actually makes the problem worse rather than better. This is a national problem that already has a solution; we just have to get past the partisanship to fix it.

For more information or to speak with one of our election experts, visit media.psu.edu or contact mediarelations@psu.edu.