Registrars of Voters and Their Conflicts

If you were going to set up a local election system devoted to fairness and to voters, how would you have registrars of voters selected? Would you have them appointed or elected? Would you have them be party members or nonpartisan?

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Let's start with electing registrars, as many Connecticut towns and cities do. The event that got me thinking about this situation occurred recently in West Haven, a city right next to New Haven. According to the New Haven Register ($$), the Democratic Registrar filed a complaint with the state, alleging that his potential challenger in an upcoming primary turned in petitions with several forged signatures. He maintains that he's just performing his duties, but was he performing his duties when he refused to give the other candidate the names of the allegedly forged signatures? Was he performing his duties when he said that the forged signatures would invalidate his opponent's entire petition, when the statute does not say this?

Even if a registrar is accurately following the law, the situation of an elected registrar sets up a serious conflict of interest. Any law that allows registrars to be elected should have provisions for this kind of situation, so that someone at the state level is responsible.

But is the situation much better when a registrar is appointed by a party committee?  Many party committees are, like the one in West Haven, riven by personal and political enmities.  Can the representative of one faction be trusted to make decisions regarding the candidacy of a member of the other faction?  Is this the best way to show voters that the system is about them and that their votes matter?

Effectively, it's a similar situation to what we saw a in Florida in 2000, when important election decisions were made by the state chairman of one party's candidate.  This sort of conflict undermines people's faith in our democratic system and makes them less likely to vote at all.

Connecticut is extreme in having registrars for both of the major parties elected, but it would seem that there would be far fewer conflicts of interest and much less appearance of impropriety if election officials were not involved with either party. Parties are part of our democratic system, but that does not mean that they have to be involved in every aspect, especially when it allows election officials to make decisions about their direct opponents or about opponents of their factions.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics