Automated Deceased Voter Identification

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2016

Prior to June 2015, the Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s (RR/CC) Voter Records and Vote by Mail Division was responsible for reviewing lists of potentially deceased voters, received from the California Secretary of State (SOS). RR/CC staff would manually inspect the Department’s voter file of over 4.8 million voter files against SOS list. For each potential deceased record to be inspected from the SOS list, the corresponding death certificate would need to be printed out and compared to the data in our voter file system. In June 2015, the RR/CC began receiving data extracts from the statewide Electronic Death Registration System (EDRS), which in turn allowed the Department to automate a query. This new procedure allowed the RR/CC to match records in the voter file, and data sets extracted from EDRS. Since June of 2015, the Department has received a monthly data extract from our partner, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Heath (DPH) so that we can identify deceased voters in an automated fashion. With this adjustment, the RR/CC is able to notify our Information Technology (IT) Bureau to batch cancel, on average, roughly 1800 deceased voters from our voter file every month.