Steve Burns
WMAL.com
FAIRFAX, Va. – (WMAL) They’re pulling long hours at Fairfax County’s Elections Office these days.
“We have our staff here pretty much from seven in the morning until eleven at night,” Registrar Cameron Sasnett tells WMAL. “About 40 people on average.”
That kind of staffing is par for the course as Election Day nears, but the work they have to do is made much harder thanks to the archaic system Virginia voters use to register – or at least try to.
The system was designed and built in 2007, and it showed its age this week, crashing Monday night, just hours before the deadline to register for the November elections. Sasnett estimates at least a few thousand Fairfax County voters were locked out, though he notes there were 364 days before Monday night during which residents could’ve gotten the job done.
A D.C.-based civil rights group has sued the state in an attempt to get registration re-opened.
In the meantime, there are plenty of other things registrars across the Commonwealth would like to see changed in the outdated registration system.
“The system had a lot of people applying to register to vote that were already registered,” further bogging down the overloaded system, says Loudoun County Registrar Judy Brown.
It’s not fraud, just typos and confusion, she says.
“If any of the information they’re entering doesn’t match exactly what we have in our system, it’s not going to show that they’re registered,” she says. “Maybe the name’s misspelled. The ones I’m finding, a couple numbers in the Social Security number were transposed.”
It caused some to refresh and keep trying to get a confirmation, over and over again.
“We actually had someone who submitted 58 times over a short period,” Sasnett says. “The system doesn’t actually give you a confirmation that you have actually submitted an application or that you have an application pending if you’ve matched a record.”
That, in turn, is causing those long hours in his office and some very tedious work between now and November 8.
“We have to go one by one and go through those, whether somebody has submitted it once or 58 times,” he says. “We have to go through each and every single (application) and make sure it meets criteria set forth in the law.”
Sasnett notes there is another deadline on the horizon – November 1. That is the final day to order an absentee ballot through the mail. People should avoid procrastinating there too, he says, given the current state of USPS.
Copyright 2016 by WMAL.com. All Rights Reserved. (PHOTO: Carolyn Kaster/AP)
