I doubt many Granite Staters have heard of the Kansas-based Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program to which New Hampshire belongs. Crosscheck is a database that stores states’ voter lists and crosschecks them for duplicate names that may indicate a voter is registered in two states.
Problems have plagued Crosscheck, and N.H. voters need to know.
Because it uses only a few data points (names, birthdates), Crosscheck produces false positives as much as 99% of the time. After the 2016 election, New Hampshire received a list of 94,000 names, which the Secretary of State’s Office then spent more than one year whittling down to 142. The state attorney general investigated those. In the end, five people were charged.
Moreover, not only does Crosscheck store our voter files on an insecure server, program administrators also shared the passwords over unsecured email. In 2017, personal data of 945 Kansas voters, including partial Social Security numbers, was exposed. Not surprisingly, 11 of the 31 original member states have already exited Crosscheck.
Importantly, Crosscheck has not been in operation since 2017 because of cybersecurity concerns flagged by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. This means that nothing has been done to clean N.H. voter rolls or identify potential voter fraud since the 2018 election.
Another election is almost upon us. The secretary of state and the Legislature need to act immediately to get New Hampshire out of the defunct Crosscheck and into a modern, efficient system that guarantees the accuracy and security of our voter rolls.
KYRI CLAFLIN
Concord