Secretaries of state press Congress for federal data access to clean voter rolls

WASHINGTON — Secretaries of state testifying before the House Subcommittee on Elections said federal help accessing citizenship and death records and funding for state systems is needed to keep voter rolls accurate and maintain public confidence.

At the hearing, Secretary of State Wes Allen of Alabama described the Alabama Voter Integrity Database, or AVID, and said his office has removed “more than half a million ineligible voters” since he took office. He told members that obtaining timely access to the Social Security Administration’s death data and noncitizen data from the Department of Homeland Security has been “absurdly time consuming and overly burdensome.” He urged Congress to “cut through that red tape.”

The nut of witnesses’ arguments was that better data and tools would let states quickly identify likely noncitizens and deceased registrants without resorting to ad hoc, error-prone processes.…