Georgia Official: Glitch led to flood of ID checks

October 25, 2008

Voter verifications: Georgia's secretary of state says her office made 747,106 requests, not nearly 2 million.

By Mary Lou Pickel
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A computer programming glitch is to blame for the nation-leading number of voter registration checks Georgia ran this year through the Social Security Administration, Secretary of State Karen Handel says.

The commissioner of the Social Security Administration had asked Handel earlier this month why Georgia had sent 2 million voter registration verification requests to his office in the past year. The number was higher than that for any other state.Handel wrote to Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue last week saying that her office did not request "anywhere near" 2 million checks.

The exact number was 747,106. The Georgia Department of Driver Services, however, re-sent many requests, resulting in duplicates and the high but erroneous figure of 1,956,464 Social Security checks, Handel's office said.

"It is clear that the number of records cited previously by the Social Security Administration was inaccurate," said Deputy Secretary of State Robert Simms.

Still, the state is only supposed to request Social Security checks for those voters who don't have a license or a state ID card, the Social Security Administration said.

The 747,106 checks that were sent to the Social Security Administration from Georgia would still be the second most in the nation, and about 10 percent of the national total, according to data from the Social Security Administration. Only Alabama, with 1.04 million checks, sent more.

In an Oct. 17 letter to Astrue, Handel said the problem lies with the computers at Georgia's Department of Driver Services and the Social Security Administration.

Handel said in the letter that she was "dismayed" that Astrue sent letters to the U.S. Attorney General's Office and that he issued a press release on the matter before contacting her. She said Astrue and his staff questioned her in writing without "even a basic understanding of the situation."

Patti Patterson, regional spokeswoman for the Social Security Administration, would only say, "We are happy that the state of Georgia reviewed their procedures as Commissioner Astrue requested. We have no additional comments at this time."

The DDS has since changed its program.

"The process has been refined so the Department of Driver Services is no longer having to re-send inquiries," said Susan Sports, spokeswoman for the department.

Handel admits to some technical and programming errors in her office as well, although she said her staff was not aware of them.

According to Handel's letter to Astrue and another she wrote to the Department of Justice, here is what happened:

Every night, the Secretary of State's Office sends new voter registration information to the DDS to check the accuracy of a voter’s name, date of birth, driver's license number, Social Security number and citizenship. It also sends a request if an existing voter made changes to his or her basic information, excluding address changes.

Federal law requires states to set up such systems to check voter information.

In Georgia, the DDS would forward some of those records —- for voters without driver’s licenses —- to the Social Security Administration for verification. Social Security then would send them back to the DDS, which would return them to the Secretary of State’s Office in the morning.

The problem arose because the Social Security Administration would not finish checking an entire batch of records overnight. Unchecked voter records remained in a queue and were "cycled repeatedly through the process," as the computer tried to complete the entire batch, Handel wrote.

"The records that get caught in the 'loop' are being counted multiple times by the SSA as new requests —- even though they are the same records," Handel wrote.

Her letter to the Department of Justice stresses that she did not try to check all the state’s 5.5 million voters or any voter information beyond what federal law allows.

Of the nearly 750,000 verification requests that Handel’s office sent to the DDS, 146,968 represented duplicates due to either programming errors or mistakes by Handel's staff, the letter says.

Most of those mistakes happened because Handel's office tried to check the citizenship of 12,926 people who had unknown or noncitizenship status. The Secretary of State's Office wanted those records to be checked by the Social Security Administration because it thought, mistakenly, that the Social Security database would indicate citizenship. Due to the same programming loop error, those records were sent eight times, resulting in 103,408 unnecessary checks, according to Handel's letter.

Staff writer Aaron Gould Sheinin contributed to this article.

Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution