Home is Where the … Postal Box Is? Hillsborough Deals with Registrations at Business Addresses

[Image courtesy of upsstorelocal]

As I’ve noted numerous times, the concept of residence in elections is fiendishly difficult, as people often have several places that they can call home. Election officials in Hillsborough County (Tampa) FL are discovering how fluid that definition can be in the wake of reports that numerous voters were using business addresses – in particular, private mailboxes at those stores – as their voter registration address. The Tampa Tribune has more:

Hillsborough County elections officials are supposed to flag any voter registration that’s submitted with a business rather than a home address, but they’ve discovered that a filter designed to help them with the process hasn’t worked for years.

A citizen alerted the elections office in December to 117 names he found on the voter rolls listing UPS stores as home addresses. UPS, like the U.S. Postal Service, rents secure space for mail delivery.

A search afterward by the elections office added 34 names to the list, for a total of 151.

“If we had known they were on there, we would have taken appropriate steps to get them off or get them in a right residential address,” Elections supervisor Craig Latimer said.

It turns out the problem isn’t new; a Tampa Tribune analysis shows that 106 of those voters had been on the supervisor’s rolls at those addresses in March 2012. Latimer said his research shows many of the voters had been on the rolls since the 1990s.

The source of Hillsborough’s problem is twofold. First, voters aren’t aware (or don’t care) that they must use their residential address for their voter registration:

A home address is important because geography determines most of a voter’s representatives, in races from the school board to Congress …

The application people fill out when they register to vote has a line that says “Address where you live.” It further specifies that the applicant should enter their “legal residence — not a P.O. Box.” The application goes on to ask for a mailing address if it is different from the residential address.

At the bottom of the form, the applicant signs an oath swearing he or she is a qualified elector and that all the information provided is true.

The 151 people who listed business addresses as their homes violated the oath, Latimer said, but he added that they are guilty only of ignorance.

“These are people who don’t really understand the nuances and how particular the law is,” he said.

One of those voters was Teresa Fudge, who listed her residential address as the UPS store at 235 Apollo Beach Blvd. Fudge said she was living between homes in Apollo Beach and Georgia. She thought she had given the elections office the address of her home in Apollo Beach.

“I would have thought my registration would have had my residential address,” said Fudge, who sold her Apollo Beach home in 2009. “I would have had no reason not to have given my residential address.

Second, the system that the County had established to identify such problems simply wasn’t working:

Latimer acknowledged he would have started the process even earlier if he had known that the computer filter that was supposed to weed out commercial addresses was misfiring.

“They shouldn’t have been able to register or we should have been able to see it quicker,” he said.

The vendors hired by the elections office to provide computer mapping and voter roll maintenance have yet to fix the computer glitch that allowed the commercial addresses to slip by unnoticed. Until that happens, the office is checking addresses manually, Latimer said.

Hillsborough’s situation is one that is likely to emerge in other communities as election officials get new tools (and new pressure) to check and scrub voter rolls. I have little doubt that these postal-box registrations are a function of voters’ seeking convenience and/or privacy rather than an effort to game the system; yet, the existence of such registrations in these quantities does open up the system to criticism and concerns about ineligible voters. The trick is to prevent such registrations before they get on the rolls – especially since many voters either don’t read (or actively ignore) instructions about the proper address to use.

This story is yet another reminder that voters are human – and humans don’t always do what you ask or expect. As the policy sphere begins to push election officials toward 100% accuracy on voter rolls, finding a way to account for the “noise” that humans introduce into the system will be increasingly important.