07/27/06 Voter Id Number Private, Group Says: But Official Calls Law An 'error'

Allowing a unique voter identification number to be made public is a violation of state privacy laws, a government watchdog group said Wednesday.

The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign took issue with the state Elections Board, which said in a July 21 memo that unique voter identification numbers generated under a statewide registration system are public information.

The memo said individuals and organizations with an interest in having access to the information stored in the database are coming forward and asking for it. The voter identification number is public and must be provided, the memo said.

Board spokesman Kyle Richmond said a protection of the number in state law was a "drafting error" that will be targeted for correction next year. Making the identification numbers public does not put anyone's private information at risk, Richmond said.

"We don't think there's any reason to treat it as confidential," Richmond said. "It's an internal number only."

While those with an interest in getting voters' names and addresses from the list for purposes of mass mailings may not care about the identification number, it does not make it OK for the Elections Board to violate the law, said Mike McCabe, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.

"It's not for the Elections Board to decide which voter privacy protections should be upheld and which ones should be ignored," McCabe said.

The law in question says that certain information contained in the database is not public. That includes the voter's birth date, driver's license number, Social Security number and the "registration identification number."

According to the law, that information is only to be accessible to employees of the Elections Board, a municipal clerk, a deputy clerk, an executive director of a city board of election commissioners, or a deputy designated by the executive director.

Richmond said eventually election officials will be able to generate voter lists without using the number, but for now it is included.

McCabe said the problem lies with Accenture, the firm hired under a $14.1 million contract to develop the voter registration system. The software being developed didn't take into account nuances of Wisconsin's law, he said.

"The board doesn't appear to be in a position to abide by the law," McCabe said. "It appears that it is cumbersome or perhaps even impossible for them to figure out a way to make data available on the registration list while excluding that number."

After election troubles in Florida in 2000, Congress passed a law requiring all states to create state-run voter databases. The lists were supposed to be completed by Jan. 1, 2006, but Wisconsin is one of a number of states to miss that deadline.

Wisconsin's database is scheduled to be up and running by the Sept. 12 primary, but it may not be available everywhere.