Suit challenges new voter-registration law

Misspelled names and other minor errors could improperly keep thousands of voters off the rolls in Washington state, a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday in Seattle says.

The complaint, filed in U.S. District Court, seeks to overturn a law that voter registrations must match personal information in other government databases.

Plaintiffs in the suit, including a labor union, minority voter groups and poverty advocates, also want a judge to bar the state from striking mismatched registrations ahead of the September primary and November general elections.

State elections officials were reviewing the lawsuit and declined comment. But Trova Heffernan, a spokeswoman for Secretary of State Sam Reed, said the matching law was meant to make sure potential voters do not misrepresent their identities.

The law in question directs Reed to compare driver's licenses, state identification cards or Social Security numbers on registration forms with records from state and federal agencies to ensure that a voter's information matches.

Potential voters can't be registered without a proper match. People whose applications are questioned are required to respond to the state's efforts to verify their identity within 45 days, or they're not included on the rolls.

Washington's law is the strictest of a small number of states with such a requirement, said Justin Levitt, a plaintiffs' attorney from the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School, which coordinated the lawsuit.

In many other cases, states use matching systems to help administrators clean up the voter rolls, Levitt said. But Washington's approach is uncommon — and, he alleged, unconstitutional — because a person's ability to vote hinges directly on a records match.

That process is fraught with small but serious errors, including improperly filled applications and data-entry mistakes at the bureaucratic level, that could lead to about 20 percent of registrations being unnecessarily spoiled, Levitt said.

The problems could be more pronounced among voters in ethnic minority groups, the lawsuit said, because of confusion over a person's first and last names.

The state law being challenged went into effect Jan. 1. Plaintiffs include the Washington Association of Churches, Washington Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, Organization of Chinese Americans of Greater Seattle, Chinese Information and Service Center, Korean American Voters Alliance and Washington Citizen Action.