New voting
record worries
GOP leader

Linda Lingle says an
'inactive' list could lead to
'widespread fraud'

By Richard Borreca
Star-Bulletin

The number of registered active voters in Hawaii has dropped by nearly 6 percent since the 1998 general election.

Voter registration officials are listing 34,594 as "inactive voters."

They either died, changed addresses, left Hawaii or simply didn't vote in the past three elections, said Jenny Wong, city clerk.

Her office, along with the neighbor island county clerks and the state office of elections, has decided to put those people on an "inactive voter" list.

The people, if they show up to vote this fall, will be allowed to do so, but they will have to refile a voter registration application at the time they vote, Wong said.

That has Linda Lingle, chairwoman of the state GOP, worried. Lingle, who narrowly lost the state race for governor, has been a critic of the voter registration system.

When told about the recent change in voter registration policy, Lingle said it opened the opportunity for "widespread fraud" because someone could get an absentee ballot in the "inactive voter's" name and then vote twice.

"If people are eligible to vote when they are on the list, why are you making a separate list? What is the distinction and the purpose for it?" she asked.

According to the National Voting Act, a government agency cannot take someone off the voter lists for not voting. Before the law's implementation, the state would purge voters who had failed to in the previous election.

Wong explained that the inactive voter list has been created to avoid the expense of sending voter information to people who don't vote.

"If they are an inactive voter and show up at the polls, they fill out a form to activate their status," Wong said.

Those voters also would have to provide a picture ID to be able to vote. For persons on the inactive list who request an absentee ballot, their signatures are checked against the previous voter registration forms they filled out, Wong explained.

The list was made because the voter registration officials have the responsibility of keeping the voter rolls current, Wong said.

To do that, every registered voter is sent a confirmation card in April; those cards that are returned to the clerk's office will be followed by another card that requests that the post office forward it to the person's new address.

If that card is still returned, the name will not be printed in the poll books, but the person is still eligible to vote.

"But, they will not be counted as part of our active voter pool," Wong said.

Since the 1998 election, about 4,000 voters in Hawaii have either died or moved to another state or canceled their voter registration.

At the same time, about 7,000 new voters have been added to the rolls. The overall drop in registered active voters comes from the large number of people who simply didn't vote in the past three elections.