Some online voter registrations are faulty
 
Arizona Daily Sun  10/31/2004

 TUCSON (AP) Thousands of Arizonans who registered to vote over the Internet are missing from voting rolls in the state's 15 counties.

The missing voters were discovered when the Secretary of State's office compared its computer file of those who used the EZ Voter system to register online with lists maintained by county recorders.

Deputy Secretary of State Kevin Tyne said he did not know how many of the 2,305 voters are actually missing.

However, county recorders said not all of those voters were actually missing. Some were legitimately bounced because their forms were improperly filled out.

For example, people who registered using a post office box for an address were held off the rolls and sent a post card asking them to reregister, said Pima County Recorder F. Ann Rodriguez.

And many of the 164 names Rodriguez received from the state are not missing at all. For instance, a big batch of people with "Mc" in their last names were listed as missing but are not. It's just that the state's computerized listing has a space between the prefix and the rest of the name, while the county's list does not.

In Cochise County, 11 of 37 names flagged by the state were actually on the rolls, said Sylvia Gruhn, that county's chief deputy recorder.

Tyne said the final resolution of the validity of a voter registration application is the recorders' job. He added that the state ran its audit simply to "take care of any registrations that may have fallen though the cracks."

"Out of those we made them aware of, there may be some that are perfectly good to go," Tyne told the Daily Star.

Because voting rosters have already been printed for each polling place Tuesday, it's too late to add people who need to be restored.

But Tyne said county recorders have been instructed to make supplemental lists, issue certificates to the missing voters or simply send a list of the voters to each polling place so those people can vote.

The state's Internet registration system, EZ Voter, allows Arizonans to register online at a secure site maintained by ServiceArizona, the same company that runs the state's online automobile registrations.

The applications are sent daily in electronic form to the recorders' offices, Tyne said.

He said 226,187 Arizonans registered to vote online between Jan. 1 and the close of registration on Oct. 4, when 21,100 people registered in one day.