A Little Election Weekend Reading

There’s a list at the North Dakota Secretary of State’s Office, and if you live in North Dakota, you’re on it. You and about half a million of your neighbors. It’s a big list. Probably the biggest list in the state.

How do I know you’re on it? Because every North Dakotan who regularly reads these dispatches surely votes in our elections. And that’s how you get on the list. No “low-information voters” here.

The list is the North Dakota Central Voter File. It’s made up of people who have voted, and pretty much everyone who might want to vote. It was created in 2008, I think enacted by the 2007 Legislature, to try to safeguard our elections, because we are the only state in the country without voter registration.

So, our Legislature said, if you don’t want to register to vote, that’s fine, but we’ll just do it for you!

Here’s how it works.

According to the North Dakota Century Code, Chapter 16.1-02, your county auditor, and the Secretary of State, with information gleaned from driver’s license records at the North Dakota DOT, have created the list with your name, address, and legislative district/county/precinct information. You’ve also got a “unique identifier” generated by, I guess, the computer on which the information is stored.

The information is used to create a pollbook for each voting place in the state. The pollbooks might be a real paper book, or a laptop or tablet type of computer. Those computerized devices are called “PollPads.”

The PollPad serves two purposes. It contains a list of everyone who is eligible to vote in a given precinct/city/county, and, once you’re given a ballot, it serves as a record of you having voted. Here’s what the Secretary of State’s office says about them:

“PollPads, also known as electronic pollbooks, are used only to check-in voters at polling locations. PollPads read data from a voter’s ID and verify that information against the Central Voter File. PollPads are connected through a secure, private network to every other PollPad used in North Dakota’s elections. Once a voter checks in at one polling location, statewide every other polling place’s PollPads are updated with this information. This prevents voters from voting more than one time per election. PollPads are tested extensively before each election.”

Wow! That’s pretty impressive. Once you’ve voted, every precinct poll worker in the state knows that. Instantly.

I voted early in this election, so I didn’t get a chance to see how this actually works at a precinct polling place. But when I checked in to vote at the Bismarck Civic Center, I showed the fellow checking me in my driver’s license, and he used a laptop-type computer, I’m guessing a PollPad, to find me, and printed a little receipt that I took to the lady with the ballots, allowing me to vote. He even found my middle name on his PollPad.

The Century Code even spells out how to keep the lists updated since the creation of the system in 2008 using our driver’s license records.

• The county auditors enter the names of new voters after each election.
• The North Dakota Department of Health and Human Services notifies the Secretary of State, on a regular basis, of everyone over 18 who dies. And their names are taken off the Central Voter File.
• If you get married or divorced and your name changes, HHS or the State Court Administrator tells the Secretary of State, and the list is fixed.
• Every Monday morning, the Director of the Department of Corrections notifies the Secretary of State of newly-convicted felons and they are marked ineligible to vote on the Central Voter File. You read that right. Every Monday morning. But when they get out of jail, the Corrections Director tells the Secretary of State they are now eligible to vote again.
• And the DOT, which provided the initial list of people with driver’s licenses, reports any changes to your record “regularly” to the county auditors, including address and name changes. Oh, and the DOT also issues nondriver ID’s, and records and updates those as well.

County auditors have other work to do as well. If boundaries of a precinct are changed, they have to update the voter records for that precinct, so the PollPad is accurate at the next election. Must have been quite a job after the 2021 redistricting.

I had some other issues I wasn’t quite sure about, so I sent the Secretary of State’s office some questions.

–My first question is, what if my name wasn’t there. If, for example, I am a new voter. What happens then?

–Do all voting precincts use electronic pollbooks, or do some use paper? If so, how are they generated and delivered? 

And I am especially curious about this: 

–I read in the Century Code that candidates can get a voter file list. I wasn’t sure about the “exempt record” language. Help me out. If I am running for county commissioner, can I get the name and address of everyone in my county who is in the file? What other information can I get about potential voters? If I am running for Congress, can I get the whole state voter file? How? Electronic or paper? Do I pay for those lists? How much?

I really did not know that I could get a list of all the voters. Seems to me if I was running for office, that would be a pretty good thing to have. I’m pretty sure we didn’t have this Central Voter File back in the day when I was working for the North Dakota Democratic-NPL Party, but it surely would have been a good tool in my Get-Out-The-Vote efforts. I remember someone told me that Abraham Lincoln said that to win an election, you need to:

–Make a perfect list of all the voters

–Ascertain, with certainty, who they will vote for

–Deliver them to the polls

I don’t know if LIncoln really said that, but we tried to do that back in those days, and we did a pretty good job of it, and we used to win elections. Not so much any more.

The Secretary of State’s office is pretty busy right now, and they haven’t gotten back to me to answer my questions, but I’m not troubled by the lack of information for me. If I get it later, I’ll let you know. But they did put together a pretty slick informational flyer which you can look at, or even print, by clicking here. And if you’re a little bit nerdy like me, you can read the Century Code Section here.

Meanwhile, I think we can be reassured that there’s nothing nefarious going on here vis-à-vis next week’s election. I just thought this Central Voter File thing was kind of interesting. Don’t forget to vote. And please, don’t vote for Trump.

Oh, and lots of people have been asking Lillian and me for information on the measures on the ballot. “How did you vote?” they ask. So, here’s my response.

Measure 1. Yes

Measure 2. No

Measure 3. No

Measure 4. No

Measure 5. Not telling.