Initiative would force all voters to reregister

OLYMPIA — Voters would have to prove they are U.S. citizens and reregister to vote under an initiative that supporters said they will file this week.

Conservative think tank Evergreen Freedom Foundation has formed Grassroots Washington, which is backing the initiative that is expected to be announced today.

The group takes issue with the state's new $6 million voter-registration database, which has been checked for duplicate and dead voters since last month.

Booker Stallworth, the foundation's spokesman, said he was concerned with the number of duplicate voters the system has found, as well as the number he believes the system hasn't caught.

The initiative would make all voter registrations inactive until people proved their citizenship and reregistered. Voters who show up at the polls and find they are inactive can vote by provisional ballot until their registration is verified, he said.

Grassroots Washington must collect nearly 225,000 valid voter signatures by July 7 to qualify for the November ballot.

But Assistant Secretary of State Steve Excell said it's a wrong move. "Just because we don't happen to think that every voter record is perfect, we can't, wholesale, disenfranchise everybody," he said.

Excell said investigators had not found any evidence of illegal votes, and noted that most of the questioned registrations were inactive.