At the heart of many election conspiracy theories is a simple truth: America’s voter rolls are imperfect.
The U.S. doesn’t have a central voting list. It has a bunch of different lists. And they will always be slightly off.
Charles Stewart, an election data expert at MIT, remembers being at a conference 20 years ago where an election official from Belgium was talking about voter rolls.
“He said, ‘The problem with you Americans is that you were never conquered by Napoleon,’ ” Stewart recalled. “Napoleon wanted to know where everybody was.”
In other words, many democracies have national voter lists. But in the decentralized U.S., lists are maintained at the state and local level, leaving election officials across the country trying to keep up with a population that moves and dies and is generally changing every single day.
That’s a difficult problem, especially when people are also skeptical of the government having too much of their information.
“Everybody talks about wanting government systems to all work seamlessly,” said Wesley Wilcox, a Republican who runs elections in Marion County, Fla. “But in the same vein, you come back and say we don't want Big Brother knowing about this, that and the other.”
This fundamental data problem comes up in two major conspiratorial narratives around elections: There are more registered voters than eligible citizens, and noncitizens are voting in big numbers.
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