Virginia Department of Elections reports thousands more unprocessed voter registration transactions
State election officials’ problem processing voter data submitted through the Department of Motor Vehicles is bigger than initially thought — with the Virginia Department of Elections announcing Monday it discovered thousands more unprocessed voter registration transactions.
The discovery, which comes after the state disclosed 107,000 unprocessed transactions in early October, puts added pressure on local election officials to catch up just a week away from the mid-term elections.
The Department of Elections initially issued a news release Monday indicating 149,000 “additional records” were sent to local registrars. Spokesperson Andrea Gaines later walked back the total number of unprocessed transactions, writing in an email that “the 149k number includes transactions included in the initial 107k.”
“These records may include duplicates and records with later transaction dates that have already been updated,” Gaines said.
Hampton Roads registrars said Monday they are working overtime to process thousands of registrations turned over by the state, but that the delay should not prevent any eligible voter from casting a ballot.
Chesapeake Voter Registrar Mary Lynn Pinkerman said her office received an additional 3,200 records since Saturday — that’s in addition to an earlier tranche of roughly 4,000 backlogged records.
Pinkerman said although the local voter registrar’s offices didn’t start receiving the records until recently, they were all submitted by voters before the Oct. 17 voter registration deadline. Because of this, she said the situation should impact no one’s vote.
She said her office would try its best to process the applications without adding too much overtime, although she said she might “pull some extra people in” to accomplish that.
“We get it done for the voters’ sake,” Pinkerman said. “I mean, it’s not their fault; it’s not our fault. It’s just, you know, we got to do what we got to do to make it happen.”
The problem stems from a technical issue that prevented voter registration transactions done at the DMV from automatically being sent to local registrars for processing. The transactions could include new voter registrations as well as address changes.
The problem came to light for the second time after after several voters tried to cast early voting ballots and found their information had not been updated, according to the Department of Elections.
“In each case, the voter’s information was updated onsite by the general registrar, and the voter proceeded to vote,” the Department of Elections said in a news release.
Stephanie Iles, general registrar for Norfolk, said her staff was surprised when more registrations with timestamps dating back to this summer began trickling in on Saturday.
Norfolk received nearly 4,000 unprocessed transactions from Saturday to Monday, but after weeding out duplicates was down to about 3,400 they needed to process, Iles said. That’s compared to the 3,352 unprocessed records the office received in early October.
“We’re going to do what it takes to get it done, that’s our job,” Iles said, adding that their goal is to finish processing them by Saturday evening. “(Same day registration) is a safeguard at this point. We’re going to do everything we can to try and have everybody in there but if something was not received it’s kind of out of our control, unfortunately.”
All affected voters have been able to vote so far, according to the Department of Elections. Voters whose registration was not processed by the Oct. 17 deadline can still vote by going through the same-day registration process and casting a provisional ballot through Election Day.
Hampton Voter Registrar Tara Morgan said the city received 1,700 voter registration applications over the weekend — which she said is in addition to the 2,200 backlogged applications Hampton had to process a month earlier.
Morgan predicts that the situation will lead to her office having about 3-4 hours of overtime each day through the election. She added that some part-time staff are helping as well.
“It’s not ideal, you know, especially when we’re already getting everything together for our elections,” Morgan said.
Portsmouth Voter Registrar Alexandra Abell said Portsmouth received 1,300 new applications over the weekend. These applications are in addition to the more than 1,500 extra applications the office had to process earlier this fall due to the state-wide error.
Despite the additional workload on her staff, she assured that “this snafu will not prohibit eligible voters from casting their ballot on Election Day.”
Gavin Stone, 757-712-4806, gavin.stone@virginiamedia.com
Josh Janney, joshua.janney@virginiamedia.com
