By Alison Bruzek
WBUR
November 3, 2017
Massachusetts in March quietly ended its participation in a controversial program that’s designed to detect duplicate voter registrations.
The secretary of state’s office confirmed the move to WBUR after we inquired about the state’s participation in the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, following conflicting reports from the ACLU and others. A spokesperson says Massachusetts voter data was deleted from Crosscheck’s files in March 2017.
The voter fraud detection program is run by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. It was started by Kansas and three other states in 2005. Crosscheck is designed to detect potential duplicate registrations by comparing voter rolls in participating states. The system identifies voter registrations that have identical first names, last names and dates of birth.
According to Crosscheck data provided to Iowa — one of the participating states — the system does not use Social Security numbers or middle names.
The program has come under fire after several reports, including a Washington Post article, noted that the system finds a high rate of false positives.
“The problem with Crosscheck is that there were a lot of misidentified people — folks who were identified as having voted in other states,” says Rahsaan Hall, director of the Racial Justice Program for the ACLU of Massachusetts. “It sends really troubling messages that this is the type of investment into election laws and voting in this country.”
One study found that Crosscheck was wrong more than 99 percent of the time.
In 2017, 28 states participated in Crosscheck, according to Kobach’s office. Those states send their voter data to Kansas election officials, where voter rolls are compared with other participating states. Each state is then sent back a list of voters whose names and dates of birth match with a voter in another state.
According to Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin’s office, the first time the state used Crosscheck data was in 2015.
