NH SoS’s instructions to strike voters from registration rolls erroneously targeted hundreds of recent, eligible voters in Manchester alone, according to a Sept 2017 analysis by City of Manchester staff recently uncovered by a May 25 Right To Know request
*** 44% error rate found by initial city spot-check, indicating nearly 6,000 voters flagged incorrectly statewide by Crosscheck Interstate Voter Registration Program ***
*** Below: Links to 18 previously-internal government emails ***
“I do not feel comfortable removing 859 voter records where 44% of the sample was found to be an active voter in Manchester. “ – September 2017 email from Assistant City Clerk JoAnne Ferruolo to Manchester City Clerk Matthew Normand
Hundreds of eligible Manchester voters were flagged as out-of-state voters by the Crosscheck program despite their more recent voting history here in New Hampshire, according to newly-revealed internal City of Manchester 2017 staff emails made public by Colin Van Ostern’s political committee after obtaining them through a Right to Know request late last week.
“It is important that legislators and members of the public are given a full view into how widely the Crosscheck system has inaccurately painted thousands of valid New Hampshire voters with a broad brush and put large numbers of eligible voters’ registration status erroneously at risk,” said Van Ostern, who released 18 government emails & attachments made public by his Right to Know request so the voters could come to their own conclusions about the 2017 incident. “The high volume of mistakes present in the Crosscheck system are distracting from the real, nonpartisan steps that New Hampshire could be alternatively pursuing to better secure our state elections – such as adding random audits of our machine counts and electronic voter check-in to better detect any potential election-day irregularities.”
The previously internal emails & analysis by staff in the Manchester City Clerk’s office in September of 2017 identified a 44% error rate after just an initial spot check – which if representative of other municipalities indicates nearly 6,000 recent, eligible voters were flagged incorrectly for removal from the voter registration lists by the Crosscheck program and the New Hampshire Secretary of State’s office.
According to an email from Manchester Assistant City Clerk JoAnne Ferruolo to Manchester City Clerk Matthew Normand on September 25, 2017:
“Last week Manchester’s voter database ElectioNet was updated to included 859 matches found through the cross check process . . . Here is a printout of the header on the screen above each page of the list of voters: Note that the 1st paragraph above emphasizes “shall strike the name…”. Upon review of the 859 names I randomly searched 34 records to determine the accuracy of the list. I found 15 voters (44%) that have voted in Manchester after the date of registration in the other state. It became clear that using a registration date comparison is not going to accurately identify interstate duplicate voters . . To confirm that the voter should not be removed their election history was researched and it was found the voter had voting history in Manchester after they registered in the other state . . . The Secretary of State has provided this data to the local jurisdictions to act on. I do not feel comfortable removing 859 voter records where 44% of the sample was found to be an active voter in Manchester.”
This error rate was only based on an initial spot check of vote history data, and did not even yet consistently identify duplicate names or other errors which have been widely reported in other states.
Manchester’s 859 voters flagged for removal by Crosscheck represent 1.3327% of the 64,456 registered voters in Manchester as of Spring 2017. At that time, statewide voter registration totaled 984,920 voters. If the proportion of flagged voters in Manchester are representative of the data flagged in other municipalities, state officials identified as many as 13,125 voters statewide for removal based on the Crosscheck data; a 44% error rate would indicated 5,775 voters were erroneously flagged.
The emails below were made public following a May 25, 2018 response to a Right To Know request to the City of Manchester by Free & Fair New Hampshire, which is the political committee working to elect Colin Van Ostern as Secretary of State of New Hampshire in December, 2018.
Emails obtained by the Right to Know request include:
- Quoted Above: Email from Assistant City Clerk JoAnn Ferruolo 9.25.17
- Email from City Solicitor Emily Rice 9.25.17
- Email from City Clerk Matthew Normand 9.29.17
- Email from Assistant City Clerk JoAnn Ferruolo 7.29.17
- Email from ACLU Director Giles Bissonette 9.25.17
- Email from ACLU Director Giles Bissonette 2 9.25.17
- Series of 12 emails between Assistant City Clerk JoAnn Ferruolo, NH SoS & Town of Milford, MA
- Interstate Crosscheck Instructions from NH SoS
- Attachment: Interstate Voter Cross Check instructions
- Attachment: HB-1482
“Instead of painting thousands of eligible voters with the brush of potential voter fraud, state officials could better strengthen our elections with more precision by adopting policies like requiring random hand-count audits of paper ballots to verify machine tabulations; allowing electronic voter check-in to better detect election-day irregularities; ending our state’s refusal to cooperate with the US Department of Homeland Security’s efforts to audit our election systems for vulnerabilities; and supporting nonpartisan redistricting reform to minimize the gerrymandering that rigs elections before they even happen,” said Van Ostern. “It is disappointing that our Secretary of State is resisting every one of these nonpartisan reforms while single-mindedly focusing instead on flawed political tools like Crosscheck, which was built by those working actively to restrict the rights of eligible voters in New Hampshire and nationwide .”
After city officials and nonprofit advocates like the ACLU successfully protested the initial instruction to remove flagged voters from the registration roles in September, 2017, the Secretary of State’s office reversed their instruction to do so, which was reported in late September. At the time, no data was given as to the extent of the instructions or errors.
“While the pushback from local officials and advocates like the ACLU successfully stopped the permanent deletion of voter registrations, we’re now finally learning how many New Hampshire voters had their status put at risk by this over-reliance on an error-prone tool like Crosscheck,” said Van Ostern. “New Hampshire is the heart of American democracy and we need to do better than this.”
