Intellectual Property Law

Election Official Moonlights as Political Consultant to Republican Candidates

By Kim Zetter

A Texas registrar of voters has been working a second job selling voter data and campaign services to Republican campaigns, according to local news reports.

Ed Johnson, the associate registrar of voters in Harris County, is the paid director of a small political consulting firm called Computer Data Systems, which he launched in 2003 with a Republican state representative. The company sold $140,000 worth of voter data and election services to Republican politicians and campaigns in 2008, which included conducting targeted mailings on behalf of clients. The information was uncovered by the Lone Star Project, a Texas-based political activist group.

CDS’s clients included U.S. Representative Michael McCaul and Harris County District Attorney Pat Lykos. The district attorney’s campaign paid Johnson’s company more than $7,000 last year for targeted mailing. The district attorney told a local paper that she didn’t know Johnson was also the county’s assistant registrar of voters.

Critics say Johnson’s job as a political consultant is a conflict of interest with his registrar job, which puts him in a position of overseeing the approval and rejection of new voter registration applications. Since some of his Republican clients appear on ballots in elections he helps oversee, it raises questions about his impartiality in registering voters and handling elections.

Last year the Texas Democratic Party sued the registrar’s office, charging that it rejected more voter applications than any other county in Texas. Harris County rejected 70,000 applications between January 2006 and October 2008 as opposed to only 1,800 rejected in Dallas County during the same period. The suit alleges that valid registration applications were not properly processed, preventing eligible voters from having their votes counted.

An employee in the registrar’s office also said that Johnson is in charge of purging voters from the registration database. Federal law allows election officials to purge voters from a list if they’ve died, notified officials that they’ve moved from the county or if they’ve failed to vote in two consecutive federal elections and have not responded to a mailing from the county election office. States that prohibit convicted felons from voting can also purge these voters from the list. But there have been a number of controversies around negligent purging of voter lists in several states.

Part of Johnson’s job also involves handling provisional ballots that voters cast on election day. Provisional ballots are cast by voters who arrive at the polls to find their name isn’t on the registration list. If they insist they did register, federal law allows such voters to cast a provisional ballot, which is counted only if election officials can determine that the voter was indeed registered and eligible to vote. Provisional ballots can can account for crucial votes in a close race.

(Hat tip: Theron Horton)

See also:

• Company Connected to GOP and Romney Delivers Diebold Machines to Maryland Polls
• Voter Registration Databases Could Disenfranchise Thousands
• Mining the Vein of Voter Rolls
• For Sale: The American Voter
• Calls for Leash on Voter Data
• Voter Privacy Is Gone–Get Over It

Full post as published by Threat Level on June 12, 2009 (boomark / email).