WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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The Indiana Secretary of State’s Office is reporting problems with voter registration information. In a statement released today, the Office says some Hoosier voters are reporting their birth dates or first names appear incorrectly in the state’s voter registration system.
When that information is incorrect, it can make it more difficult for voters to determine whether they’re registered — and it could lead some people to believe they’re not registered when, in fact, they are.
The Office’s statement goes on to suggest that “voter fraud” might be involved. WFHB spoke with Office spokesperson Valerie Warycha.
“We had people who called into the office, who voted in the primary, who said ‘I got into IndianaVoters.com and I looked for myself and I couldn’t find myself. And I called the county and discovered that my date of birth or my name had been changed,’” Warycha said.
“And from there we ran a report and compared it to other years,” Warycha continued. “We do have times where people change their names…or maybe they had a typo in their date of birth — so you do have some normal changes — but we noticed that the changes in dates of birth and names were higher than normal. And so that’s when we passed this information along to the State Police.”
It’s not clear how the Secretary of State’s Office determined that the number of changes was abnormal. Warycha would only say that the number was “unusually high.” In an interview this afternoon, Warycha declined to answer questions from WFHB News Director Joe Crawford.
Crawford: “And when you say ‘unusually high,’ do you have any numbers – what would be typical and what you’re seeing now?”
Warycha: “No, I can’t turn over any of that because that’s all part of the State Police investigation. But I can tell you it was in the thousands.”
Crawford: “There wouldn’t usually be thousands of changes?”
Warycha: “I can’t really get into any more specifics than that.”
Crawford: “So you say it was thousands (of changes) – over what period of time?”
Warycha: “I can’t really get into any more specifics. The period of time, that’s all part of the State Police investigation.”
Crawford: “You can’t say over what period of time there were thousands (of changes)?”
Warycha: “I cannot. That’s all part of the State Police investigation.”
Warycha went on to say that, if the changes to the voter registration system are actually the result of fraud, it would mean someone — or some group — somehow fraudulently filed thousands of applications, one form for each altered registration. In the scenario she describes, the fraudster would also have needed to somehow obtain the driver’s license numbers for the affected voters. Those numbers are required with each application.
Warycha says she doesn’t know if any particular group of voters — such as Democrats or Republicans — have been more affected by the changes.
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Brown County Clerk Brenda Woods says she has not heard about any unusual activity concerning voter registration information in her area. But she says in recent years there have been routine issues with birth dates.
“When we switched over into the statewide system, a lot of our voter registration cards from way back, people who had been born in the 1920s or 1930s or 1940s, they just had their age on their voter registration cards. So they got put in the system as (January 1st of their birth year),” Wood said.
“And then when people come in to check to see if they’re registered they’ll say, ‘I wasn’t born January 1st.’ So then we would update a birth date.”
It’s not yet clear if routine issues, such as that which Woods described, are the cause of the problems identified today by the Indiana Secretary of State’s Office. WFHB did reach out to officials at the Monroe County Clerk’s Office but we didn’t receive calls back by our deadline.
Indiana Secretary of State Connie Lawson has long worked to earn a reputation as an opponent of voter fraud. When she was a State Senator, Lawson championed legislation requiring photo IDs at the polls. Recently judges have struck down similar laws around the country, largely because in-person voter fraud is extremely rare. Photo ID laws have been shown to disproportionately affect black voters.
The state’s claims of voter fraud come as Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump has publicly said he believes this year’s election is rigged. Trump has warned of large-scale voter fraud, although he has not produced evidence for his claim.
The new fraud claims from the Secretary of State also come after the state government has been accused of suppressing African American voter registration in Indiana. State Police raided the offices of a group called the Voter Registration Project on October 4th, one week before the registration deadline. Police say they suspected the organization of fraud, though no charges have been filed. As many as 45,000 voters, many of whom are reportedly African American, may not be able to vote November 8th because their applications were seized.
The raid is the subject of a new attack ad from a left-leaning political action committee called Patriot Majority USA.
Hoosier voters who worry their voter registration information is not correct should first check at Indiana Voters dot com. If they find a problem, they should contact their local County Clerk’s office or call 1-866-IN-1-VOTE.
