Bogus addresses cloud voter rolls

The grimy stucco storefront at 169 Trinity Ave. houses the Atlanta Recovery Center, a shelter for homeless men fighting drugs and alcohol. It also is home — on paper, anyway — to 208 registered voters.

One purportedly is 102 years old. Four are sex offenders who list the shelter as their permanent residence. Twenty of the 208 have cast ballots at least once since 2004

It's anybody's guess, though, as to where they actually live or where they should be registered to vote. With at least three registered twice, it's not clear how many of them really exist.

That uncertainty underscores a basic flaw that permeates Georgia's voter registration system. While lawmakers debate anti-fraud legislation that would require voters to show photo identification at the polls, an analysis by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows the system is ripe for abuses that the voter-ID proposal might not detect.

Georgia relies on an honor system that assumes voters live at the addresses they submit when they register. These addresses determine voters' precinct assignments and, consequently, the elections in which they may cast ballots.

The honor system failed in the Atlanta City Council's 6th District, the Journal-Constitution found.

Five votes separated the two candidates in November's election. But the newspaper identified seven voters who claim as their home addresses one of two UPS Stores on Monroe Drive, where each rents a mailbox. Another voter in the 6th District last November recorded his address as an apartment at 541 10th Street N.E. — the location of the tennis courts at Grady High School.

None of those eight — whose ballots could have swayed the election's results — should have been allowed to vote while registered at inaccurate addresses. But they are just a few among at least 2,000 in Fulton and other metro Atlanta counties who claim to reside at addresses that are not residential at all.

The rolls contain voters who list home addresses at the Fulton County Jail, Atlanta City Hall, downtown office towers like the Equitable Building, churches, homeless shelters, schools, the Journal-Constitution's headquarters, even the county government complex on Pryor Street — the same address as the election office.

More than 1,000 voters in metro Atlanta registered from addresses that actually are commercial mailbox facilities such as UPS Stores, according to the Journal-Constitution's analysis. About 700 of those voters are registered in Fulton County, 132 in DeKalb and 91 in Gwinnett. The rest are dispersed across the metro area.

The findings, particularly concerning the 6th District council race, did not surprise John Sullivan, Fulton County's voter registration chief.

"If you start digging in any close election," Sullivan said, "it's possible to find enough to overturn the election."

'What difference does it make?'

On Larry Royster's voter registration record, his home address is listed as Apartment F913 at 1579 Monroe Drive in Atlanta. No such apartment exists. Instead, that address is a mailbox inside the UPS Store across from Ansley Mall.

Royster, 59, was one of the seven people with addresses at UPS Stores who voted in the 6th District on Nov. 8. Like Royster's, the others' registrations reflect an apartment number that is merely a mail drop.

"I'm a trucker," said Royster, who declined in a brief telephone interview to say where he lives. "I'm on the road most of the time. What difference does it make?"

State law requires that voters provide accurate home addresses to keep them from influencing the outcome of elections for which they are not eligible to cast ballots. Although knowingly giving false information on a voter registration application is a felony, officials say they have prosecuted few, if any, voters who provided an inaccurate address.

On Monday, the first day of their 2006 session, state lawmakers moved quickly to advance a bill that would require voters to present a government-issued photo identification card, such as a driver's license, at polling places. The bill, similar to one passed last year but temporarily blocked by a federal judge, passed the House Governmental Affairs Committee on Monday and could come before the full House for debate by the end of the week. The measure, however, would not require voters to document their residence.

Following inquiries by the Journal-Constitution, officials recently sent letters to voters — 526 in Fulton County, 132 in DeKalb — who cited addresses at commercial mailbox outlets. The letters instructed the voters to document their true residence or risk being deleted from the voting rolls. Gwinnett County also is checking its rolls.

DeKalb's elections board meets on the matter today. Fulton's board has scheduled a hearing for Jan. 25.

Linda Latimore, DeKalb's elections registrar, said her staff located the 132 voters at 14 commercial mailbox outlets. She does not think the improper registrations were part of an organized effort to commit election fraud.

"I think a lot of it is innocent," Latimore said. "Maybe they live in apartments and don't think the mail there is secure."

"People move in and out for convenience's sake," she said. "They just use that as their address."

Susan Segars, for instance, uses a box at a UPS Store at 1425 Market Blvd. in Roswell to collect her mail. She lives nearby, in the same voting precinct. So, she said, listing the mailbox address on her voter registration form made sense.

"It's more secure," she said. The voter rolls are public record, she said, and "I don't like to publish my address."

Segars, 43, votes regularly — 10 times this decade. But she said she has never tried to hide from poll workers the fact that her residence doesn't match her address in their files.

"They know it," she said. "I tell them every time."

Detection difficult

Despite some voters' frankness, election officials say detecting inaccurate addresses is difficult.

For years, prospective voters had to register in person at a county election office. That changed after Congress adopted the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, commonly known as the motor voter law because it allows residents to register to vote while obtaining or renewing a driver's license.

The law requires prospective voters to document only their identity, not their residence, said Chris Riggall, a spokesman for Secretary of State Cathy Cox, Georgia's chief elections officer. And the documentation of identity is not rigorous; an easily obtained Social Security card will suffice.

County election registrars plug applicants' information into a statewide computer database. If an address is on a real street, the registration goes through. The database disregards whether the address is residential, commercial or even industrial.

"It's not an extensively vetted process," Riggall said.

A few states, such as California, canvass neighborhoods to spot-check their voter lists, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, a federal agency that certifies state voting systems. Wyoming checks property ownership lists and car registrations, and Massachusetts compares its voter rolls against an annual statewide census of street addresses.

In metro Atlanta, officials said, rapid growth creates problems.

"We've got so many areas now where it's residential today, and tomorrow it's gone commercial," said Lynn Ledford, Gwinnett County's elections supervisor. Her staff is compiling a list of commercial addresses to compare against voter registration applications.

No one denies that the potential for abuse is high. Anyone who filled out a phony registration application could also present a false identification card at the polls, possibly at numerous locations, casting any number of fraudulent ballots.

Sullivan, of Fulton's elections office, said workers discovered an apparent scheme to submit fraudulent registrations in 2004.

About 5,000 applications for registration arrived in the mail, filled out in similar, if not identical, handwriting, Sullivan said. Workers also noticed that many forms appeared to have been filled out in sequence, possibly from a telephone directory.

The county sent letters to each of the purported applicants. "Of course," Sullivan said, "we had very, very few responses."

Officials discarded nearly all the apparently bogus applications, but never identified the culprit.

"We kept a bunch of trash off the rolls," Sullivan said. "But this isn't a tiny community where everybody knows everybody. Basically, whatever's on the document is what we have to deal with."

Sometimes, even blatant discrepancies slip by the workers who punch data from applications into the statewide database.

For several years, workers have processed applications from people who say they live at the Atlanta Recovery Center on Trinity Avenue, two-tenths of a mile and just around the corner from the Fulton elections office. The center offers 187 beds for temporary, "transitional" housing for homeless men looking for a place to live, said William Cowins, its operations manager. Some former clients use the center as a mail drop, Cowins said.

The applications failed to raise doubts, even coming from a man who registered to vote on July 28, 2003 — the day he supposedly turned 100. The fact that a man with the same name, born 48 years later, had also registered at the same address in 2001 slipped by, as well.

Cowins said the man receives outpatient mental health care at the VA Medical Center in DeKalb County and is "one of our best clients." He was surprised the man is registered to vote, especially as a centenarian.

"He's nowhere near 102," Cowins said. "But next week, he'd tell you he's 202."