GIVEN THAT VOTER REGISTRATION DATA IS WORTH MONEY...:

Beyond the wastefulness of an investigation into a non-issue--research shows that voter fraud almost never occurs--Trump's focus on double registration became especially curious after reporters discovered that members of his administration and family are registered to vote in two states. First, a reporter at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune uncovered that Stephen Bannon, senior adviser to the president, was registered to vote in both Florida and New York.

Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin, White House advisor (and Trump's son-in-law) Jared Kushner, and First Daughter Tiffany Trump were also all registered to vote in two states, as CNN, the Washington Post, and Heatstreet reported, respectively.

The national press took justifiable pleasure in pointing out the hypocrisy of Trump's investigation plans, but confusion about duplicate registrations is understandable. While voting in multiple jurisdictions or precincts in the same election is illegal, being registered in multiple states is not. In fact, across the United States, having multiple voter registrations is fairly common. A 2012 study conducted by the Pew Center found that at least 2.75 million people were registered to vote in more than one state, likely the result of moving from one state to another. But why do these outdated registrations persist when someone moves to a new state and becomes registered to vote there? [...]

This is partly because 1993's National Voter Registration Act (NRVA), which codified many of the practices of voter roll maintenance, leaving the practice almost entirely up to the states. The Help America Vote Act, passed in 2002 in an attempt to fix some of the voting problems (both real and imagined) of the 2000 election, required states to keep centralized voter registration databases, but did not mandate inter-state sharing. The federal government still does not maintain any national voter registration database, and few states cross-reference their voter rolls to avoid duplication. Political consulting firms (and hackers) may be the only ones to aggregate nationwide voter registration data.

Tweet   @brothersjudd