There’s a story circulating today that another round of voter registration snafus have surfaced in California. This story in today’s LA Times, “More than 23,000 Californians were registered to vote incorrectly by state DMV” has some details about what appears to have happened:

“The errors, which were discovered more than a month ago, happened when DMV employees did not clear their computer screens between customer appointments. That caused some voter information from the previous appointment, such as language preference or a request to vote by mail, to be “inadvertently merged” into the file of the next customer, Shiomoto and Tong wrote. The incorrect registration form was then sent to state elections officials, who used it to update California’s voter registration database.”

This comes on the heels of reports before the June 2018 primary in California of potential duplicate voter registration records being produced by the DMV, as well as the snafu in Los Angeles County that left approximately 118,000 registered voters off the election-day voting rolls.

These are the sorts of issues in voter registration databases that my research group is looking into, using data from the Orange County Registrar of Voters. Since earlier this spring, we have been developing methodologies and applications to scan the County’s voter registration database to identify situations that might require additional examination by the County’s election staff. Soon we’ll be releasing more information about our methodology, and some of the results. For more information about this project, you can head to our Monitoring the Election website, or stay tuned to Election Updates.