Solutions Spotlight: Cleaning up voter lists reduces election costs

People usually are diligent about changing their billing ad-dress, shutting off utilities and updating their driver’s license when they move. Updating their voter registration information is something they rarely think of — a little oversight that was costing Orange County, Calif. quite a bit of money.

With 1.6 million voters on Orange County’s rolls, costs associated with mandated election-related communications between government and citizens really can add up.

“People tend to think about updating their information with us last,” said Orange County Registrar of Voters Neal Kelley. “They’ll update their magazine subscriptions before they contact us. When you factor in postage and printing, each bad address costs the county between $3 and $4.”

Until the voter list is pared down and scrubbed for accuracy, those recurring costs will continue to increase.

One of the challenges faced by registrars of voters — including Orange County, the fifth-largest voting jurisdiction in the country — is difficulty in maintaining up-to-date addresses for voters, according to Jill Canetta, vice president of marketing and operations for Experian Public Sector.

There are more than 24 million (more than 12 percent) voter records that are significantly inaccurate, including 12 million incorrect addresses and 1.8 million records of deceased citizens. Studies show that the average citizen moves 12 times over his or her lifetime, with more than 14 percent of Americans moving annually.

Experian Public Sector offers address verification services to government organizations that need help keeping their voting lists accurate. Data collected by Experian is more accurate than what government customers can get, according to Canetta.
 

“Since we are a credit bureau, we have to go through a cleansing process with our information,” she said.

A name could be listed several different ways, depending on variations in spelling or if initials are used.

“We bring all those instances together and find the right one, saving it as a single record,” she explained. Experian® also captures data from sources like payday loan companies and rent bureaus, providing information on people who may never have purchased a home or applied for a car loan.

Experian Public Sector offered to take the Orange County list of voters and check it against its database of known addresses. By law, the county could send Experian only the name and last known address for 260,000 inactive voters — those who had not voted in Orange County for the past four years.

Once the proper addresses came back to Orange County, post cards were sent to those voters. According to Kelley, 18,600 people returned cards confirming that they had moved out of the county and no longer were eligible to vote there. Removing those people from the mailing list saved the county $80,000 in the next election. Had those bad addresses not been removed, the county would have kept trying to reach those people. Other voters on the list had moved but still were living in Orange County. Their information was updated, and their new polling place was assigned. While that didn’t save the county any money outright, it did make these people active on voter rolls again and likely saved some confusion and time on Election Day.

Orange County first checked its list in 2012 and then again in 2014. It was the first and so far only county in California to scrub its voter lists for accuracy using the Experian program. The cost to have its inactive voter records checked was less than 14 cents per record, representing a savings for Orange County.

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