3 November 2008

Montana’s Check Voter Registration Status website returns false negatives

UPDATED below. You can check the status of your voter registration online — but be careful how you do it. The VRS website has a serious bug. Entering perfectly valid information can return a false negative, an error message that your house number is not valid, when in fact your registration is in perfect order.

Over the weekend, that happened to me — someone who has lived in his house for more than 30 years and who has voted in every Montana election since 1978 — to a legislative candidate who had voted by absentee ballot, and to several others who tested the system to verify my findings. It may not happen to everyone, but it shouldn’t happen to anyone.

Here’s a screenshot of the error message I received:

How did I generate that error message? By entering data in all five fields. That’s permissible given the instructions:

You are not instructed to enter data in only the three required fields. I now think that is how the authors of the VRS wanted you to proceed, but as worded the instructions simply establish that entering data in the required fields is the minimum necessary to activate the form; that entering data in the county and house fields is optional. The instructions should have read:

And the starting screen should have looked like this:

That’s because the VRS website applies a series of filters to your personal information. The first filter matches first and last names and date of birth. If there’s a unique match, the application returns your precinct and legislative district. If there’s a match with two or more persons in the database, the application applies a second filter by matching your county. And if there’s still no unique match, it applies the third and last filter, which is your residential address (the name for the field is “house number,” which probably is confusing for those who live in apartments). I’ve designed databases. Based on my experience, that filtering sequence is logical. But only the three required fields should appeared in the starting screen’s form.

The third filter, applied via the house number field, is the one likely to cause the most trouble. A character for character match (sometimes called a deterministic or perfect match) seems to be required (a more sophisticated system would accept a partial match and ask for additional information). For example, if your registration record lists your address as 245 Elm Street, and you enter 245 Elm ST, you’ll get a false negative. I therefore entered my house number six ways to Sunday to ensure I accounted for most permutations. But I still generated an error message.

Yet a friend was able to enter data in all five fields and not generate an error message.

Why did I enter data in the county and house number fields instead of starting with just the three required fields? Because I wanted to confirm that my address and county were correct so that there wouldn’t be a problem when I vote tomorrow. Entering data in all five fields was the most efficient way to do that. And it apparently never occurred to the designers of the VRS website that someone would do what I did.

Still, it should not have returned an error message. The Secretary of State should change the wording immediately to “Please enter your information in ONLY the required fields below.” And after the election, the website should be taken down for modification.

Update. Dan Testa of the Flathead Beacon notes that the house number field wants just the house number. If you instead enter the street address, you get an error message. I hate to say it, but I missed this, even though the faint instructions on the form instruct us to enter “245” if we live at “245 Elm Street.” But I’m not letting the VRS website off the hook. It can be reasonably anticipated that many people would interpret “house number” to mean residential address, and therefore would enter the full residential address. Therefore, the error message should read along the lines of “Not a valid entry. Did you remember to enter just the number of the house, and to omit the name of the street?” And it doesn’t help apartment dwellers. Do they enter just the street number of their apartment building (which is not a house), or must they also add the apartment number?