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Brad Shannon maintains this blog. He is political editor at The Olympian and can be reached at 360-753-1688 or bshannon@theolympian.com.

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FOLLOW-UP: Six more underage voters found "active" in state database

• Published October 09, 2008

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The Evergreen Freedom Foundation said today it has found six underage voters in the state election database who are listed as “active” for the general election. This buttresses the conservative think tank’s claim that state officials are not doing enough on this problem.

Yesterday we reported that EFF was going to court to block the practice of registering 17-year-olds and keeping them on a “pending” status until they are eligible.

Michael Reitz, general counsel with EFF, said this today:

I know the Sec of State office is saying “aggressive screening” has solved the problem of underage voter registrations… But the September 26 version of the voter registration database shows seven new underage voters. Six are listed as active.

Go here to see EFF’s list.

State elections officials are sticking by their story that they think they can keep ineligible voters out of the system. David Ammons, spokesman for Secretary of State Sam Reed’s office, said in an email that their election registration expert David Motz cannot guarantee an underage voter won’t slip through, but they are confident the system is working properly — since no underage voters cast ballots in the 2007 primary or general or in the 2008 primary.

He added :

They check the statewide voter registration database every single day specifically for those under 18. The list changes as the counties are notified and deal with the situation. The database today has two 17 year olds – a Benton County guy who turns 18 on Nov. 21 and a Lincoln County woman who turns 18 on Nov. 16. The woman shows up as inactive and the man as active. In both cases, we contacted the county and they know the situation and won’t be sending out ballots. The database sometimes includes slightly larger numbers as they are identified, but when the counties deal with the situation, typically moving the voter to “pending” status or inactive status, the names typically come off the state database, removed directly by the county computer. The county records and not the state database will guide whether the county actually sends out a ballot.

The four youths who voted in the 2008 presidential primary slipped through because of “human error, such as turning off a computer system and when it reset, allowing it to go to a default position that didn’t note the under-18 status flagged for the voter,” Ammons said.

We’ll have to wait to see what a court decides.