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?<br>
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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?<br>
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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.<br>
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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?<br>
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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.<br>
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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.<br>
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Robert Wechsler<br>
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics<br>