There’s been a lot of reporting and chatter about voter fraud. I assumed this was intentional fraud until I started seeing reports that some of Trump’s advisers, cabinet nominees, and even a daughter were guilty of one of the particular missteps against which Trump rails.

I have lived in several states. I have also been registered to vote in each of them. I verified my registration on three different states, and wanted to remove my registration from the states in which I don’t actually live. Spent two hours searching two different Board of Election sites and there’s no published process for rescinding a registration. Checked the federal Election Assistance Commission — they do not even say you need to rescind your previous registration. It’s a “good idea”, but it also says “your new election office uses this information [your former address] to notify your former election office that you no longer reside in that jurisdiction”. Evidently there’s a fairly high failure rate on this process.

This is not voter fraud – it was a failure on my part to properly research the process and then follow up to confirm my non-registered status in other states. There’s a big difference between casting ballots using the same identity in multiple states, voting under multiple identities, etc and unknowingly being registered to vote in more than one state.

Making people aware of the problem – especially if local Boards of Election update their web sites with instructions on removing invalid registrations – is certainly a worthwhile endeavor. I work in IT; I like clean data. Cleaning up the state registries may make analysing data to identify actual fraud easier (i.e. the fact that I show up on three states is more indicative of fraud since it is common knowledge that individuals should be rescinding old registrations). But how much money is going to be wasted hunting for phantom election fraud?