Does Harris County do a good enough job of registering voters? That seems to be the underlying question in the top story in today's Chron:
Harris County's roll of registered voters will hit 2 million for the Nov. 4 election, according to the voter registrar — a record high that should surpass the total for all of Iowa and at least 22 other states during an exciting presidential campaign.
But the local list also has triggered controversy, surprises and skepticism about who registers and how aggressively the county recruits, and rejects, potential new voters. Even the forecast of 2 million — made by voter registrar Paul Bettencourt, a Republican seeking re-election as tax assessor-collector — is in dispute.
For starters, 2 million citizens older than 17, in a county of roughly 4 million people, would represent only meager growth from the last presidential election here. The 2004 roll fell only 60,000 shy of 2 million.
On the other hand, the roll dropped to 1.8 million a year ago, due in part to Bettencourt's groundbreaking efforts under state and federal law to remove outmoded or improper registrations.
Now, consider what the voter roll shows about the record-shattering voter turnout for the county's March 4 presidential primaries. Those elections were preceded by several voter registration drives as Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton fought for the Democratic nomination and John McCain emerged as the GOP favorite.
But of the 407,102 voters in the Democratic contest, only 9,850 had never registered to vote in Harris County before this year, according to statistics developed for the Houston Chronicle by Bettencourt's staff. And of the 169,448 people who voted in the Republican primary, a mere 2,454 had never registered here.
The story suggests that the county aggressively removes voters from rolls, which leads to obvious questions about bias. High turnout tends to favor Democrats, county offices are dominated by Republicans. Are these factors related? Recall that one of the goals of the Progressives was to minimize the ability of transients and the poor to vote by making the process more difficult. This wouldn't be unusual.