Homeless Voter Limbo

By M.E. PELLIN - EDITOR

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The Mecklenburg County Board of Elections could decide next week whether it will strip hundreds of homeless people of their voter registrations, or require them to provide directional maps that indicate their place of residence for voter registration purposes.

The elections board is scheduled to meet Monday, Sept. 26 to discuss how it plans to respond to a letter it received last month from State Board of Elections Executive Director Gary Bartlett. Bartlett’s letter was generated in response to a complaint filed earlier this year by County Commissioner Bill James. James was contesting the voter registration of 304 people who used The Urban Ministry Center as a residential address for their voter registration.

The Urban Ministry provides basic necessities like meals, restrooms, showers, mail drops and phone services for the homeless. What it doesn’t provide, however, is a place of residence. James wanted to know how 304 people – 52 of which voted in last year’s election – could be registered at the Urban Ministry in the elections board’s database.

Bartlett’s letter indicated that they shouldn’t have been.

“In the situation of a shelter that serves as a place to receive mail and other services, but not a place to store personal possessions or to sleep, it does not appear appropriate to consider that shelter a person’s residence,” Bartlett wrote. “Any individual using that site as a mailing address would be expected to supply a different residence address, either through the locational map or through the use of an address.”

State statutes define residence as that place “in which that person’s habitation is fixed, and to which, whenever that person is absent, has intention of returning.”

If a person does not have a street number address or has a non-traditional residence – such as a homeless person who might live in a camp under a bypass, for example – they can draw a map showing the specific location in which he or she lives. Under the N.C. Constitution, no property qualification is required for a person to be eligible to vote.

While James’ complaint focused on the homeless that used Urban Ministry as an address for voter registration, hundreds more could potentially be affected. Last year, more than 800 people used homeless shelters, most of which do not provide permanent or even short-term residence, as their address for voter registration. About 150 of those registrants voted in last year’s elections.

If the elections board makes a decision Monday on how to handle those voter registrations, it would likely not effect next week’s primary elections; but the decision could effect November’s general election.

“I would encourage your board to review your voter database for any such errors now that it is known that the registration process the Mecklenburg County Board of Elections office followed was flawed,” James wrote in an e-mail to Mecklenburg Elections Director Michael Dickerson. “In short, you allowed … registrations at mail drops and did not require a ‘locational map.’ Your Board has an affirmative duty to remedy this now that the State Board of Elections has reached its determination that this process is wrong.”

Elections Board member Jeff Bradsher said he wasn’t sure what action the elections board would take Monday in response to Bartlett’s letter. He said he didn’t have enough information this week to comment on how he would like to see the board proceed.

“I haven’t had a chance to read the state’s letter very carefully, and rather than me commenting on something when I don’t know the specifics, I’d rather wait until after Monday’s meeting,” said Bradsher, one of two Democrats on the three-member elections board. “I’m not even sure if the board will make a decision, or just receive the letter as information.”

Elections Board member Michael Kolb, a Republican, was out of town and could not be reached for comment. But an e-mail Kolb sent to James earlier this month provides some indication of what he would like to see happen at Monday’s meeting.

“I will be writing up some suggestions for notifying people using the Urban ministries (sic) address,” Kolb wrote. “I believe they should be notified that their registrations will likely be cancelled and be given a chance to provide a map and otherwise meet SBOE [State Board of Elections] requirements. I doubt most will ever respond. I also am asking that [elections] staff not register anyone else at that address.”

James said drastic changes needed to be made.

“I interpret [Bartlett’s letter] to mean that the Mecklenburg Board of Elections has been misinterpreting state policy and has been allowing registrations that they should not have been allowing,” James said.

He said that was by design. Democrats control the elections board, James said, and Democrats stand to gain the most from allowing the homeless to use illegal addresses to register to vote. The vast majority of people that registered using shelter addresses were registered Democrats.

“I think that what Democrat operatives did was they went down to these places like the Urban Ministry and signed people up to vote en masse,” James said.

The registration numbers at Urban Ministry add credence to that suspicion. Of the 304 registered voters, only 15 are Republicans; 50 are registered Unaffiliated, and the rest are Democrats.

The patterns that many of the registrations follow also bolster James’ allegations: there are consistently large bursts of registration activity in very short periods of time. For example, nearly all of the new voter registrations at Urban Ministry from last year were logged in concentrated clusters: 19 on Aug. 18; 16 on Sept. 15 and 16; and 36 in just the first week of April.

“I don’t think it’s just a coincidence that the Urban Ministry had all these registrations within a few, brief days – this massive registration of homeless, black Democrats,” James said in March when he filed his complaint with the elections board.

In an interview this week, Dickerson, the local elections director, said he had no immediate plans to take any action in response to Bartlett’s letter. He said it was unclear from the letter whether elections officials should remove the voter registrations in question from the database, require the people who filed those registrations to provide a locational map instead of an address, or if a formal residency challenge against each person registered using the Urban Ministry address needed to be lodged.

Dickerson said he has not received any formal residency challenges to those addresses, or any direction from the elections board on how his staff should proceed.

“I’m just an administrator,” Dickerson said. “Before I do anything, I need to receive specific direction from the elections board. If there’s a possibility to clean up my [voter registration] records, that’s great; I’d jump at the chance. But I need to know, procedurally, if I can take these people off the records or if they have to be formally challenged.”

James said no one should have to file a formal residency challenge.

“It’s not for me, or anyone else, to file 300 or how many ever challenges,” James said. “It’s for them to just fix the problem. And the problem is that they’ve been breaking state law with the way they’ve been registering these voters, and the state board of elections has said they’ve misinterpreted the rules.”

James said even if the elections board strikes the registrations in question, or requires the registrants to provide a locational map instead of an address; it still wouldn’t fix the whole problem.

As part of his original complaint, James requested that the elections board change its procedure for verifying voter registrations, which he said is flawed.

The elections board’s voter registration database, which includes more than a half-million voters, encompasses all addresses without differentiating between what would typically be considered a residential address and addresses for offices, businesses or other non-residential facilities, such as homeless shelters.

When elections officials receive a voter application, they enter the registrant’s information into their database. Then they mail a non-forwardable, voter registration card to verify the address the applicant provided on the voter registration form. If the card is not returned, the elections board registers the applicant to vote.

That, James said, is where the system is flawed. He contends the law requires elections officials to determine if an address is a legal place of residence before they mail a verification card.

“They don’t check to make sure it’s a residential address, which makes mailing a verification card useless,” James said. “And so you have this wholesale process where anyone could register at any address – a steel mill, a bank, a corporate center – and as long as they can get mail there, the state board [of elections] thinks that’s OK.

“But that’s not the law,” James said. “The law specifically states that [elections officials] are to initially determine that the address provided is proper and legal, and they’re not doing that.”

James said that the elections board should purge all non-residential addresses from its database. He said that could be accomplished with relative ease using either the US Postal Services’ residential network database or the county’s database of residential addresses and comparing them against the elections board’s voter database.

Bartlett’s letter indicated that the state elections board disagreed, and that verification mailings were adequate.

“It would not be proper or feasible for a county board to attempt to cull potentially non-residential addresses from residential addresses in processing voter registration applications … the counties do not have the means of second-guessing every residential address listed by applicants for registration,” Bartlett wrote.

James said that approach contradicts state law.

“In effect, you are saying that the State Board of Elections is assuming that if a voter applies to vote anywhere mail is delivered that it is effectively OK,” James wrote in a reply e-mail to Bartlett. “That is not OK and it is not what the law says.”

James said he would continue to pursue his complaint regarding voter address verification.

“I think they know it’s a problem; they just don’t want to deal with it,” he said.