How Orange County, California, Fixed Its Voting Database and Saved Money, Too
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Incorrect addresses waste money so officials set out to clean up their records in a big way.
When people move, they change their mailing address, get a new driver’s license and switch banking institutions. But updating their voter registration information isn’t usually a top priority.
Unfortunately for local voting registrars, more than 30 million Americans move annually, meaning their official records quickly become outdated and inaccurate. For local governments in states like California that require registrars to mail postcards with ballot information to each voter, haphazard voting lists cost money.
Printing costs for the 8.5-by-11 inch booklets combined with labor and postage fees add up to more than $2 per voter. Each postcard sent to someone who isn’t at the residence listed in their voting file is essentially the same as throwing money away. The problem is magnified for large municipalities like Orange County, the fifth-largest voting jurisdiction in the country with 1.6 million registered voters and 3 million residents.
Prior to 2012, Orange County was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars each year sending ballot information to the wrong people or no one at all each year simply for complying with state law.
“Voting databases are one of the most difficult to keep up to date for a number of reasons, but mainly it is because voters are simply not compelled to update their records,” Neal Kelley, Orange County’s registrar of voters, said in an interview. “We decided we wanted to be proactive and find a way to keep the database cleaner than it had been in the past, so we started exploring options.”
No registrar is going to have a budget large enough to reinvent the records management wheel, and Kelley said it quickly became apparent that “credit header” data—third-party information about a person to whom a credit report applies—was the logical route to explore.
“This was the most up-to-date data because people are much more apt to update their bank records before they ever update their voting records,” Kelley said.
To make use of this fact, Orange County began a partnership with Experian Public Sector in 2012. Orange County started small with Experian, a well-known data services and analytics company, running sample tests on small sets of voters to determine the best address to send the state-mandated voting postcards to. Voters that responded with signatures can have their records canceled.
In total, Kelley said Orange County has been able to cancel 40,000 voting records, with an estimated savings of $94,000 expected from 2012 through 2016. For a cost of 10 cents per record to Experian, Orange County’s database experiment paid off.
Furthermore, Orange County’s early efforts with Experian have helped paved the way for the county’s modernized approach to keeping its entire voting database up to date. Through 2016, Kelley said the county expects to avoid $800,000 by identifying 300,000 inactive voters.
A cleaner voting database isn’t just easier to manage, it’s cheaper for taxpayers, too.
“We’re trying to be innovative here,” Kelley said, before adding, “It’s not a bad deal either for voters. If they are made inactive, they can go in and quickly be made active again.”