[EL] government lists, list cleaning, social security data, and death

[Lillie Coney]

Requiring that voter registration applications collect the last four digits of the SSN and
that the numbers be verified by the SSA or state DMV records was a political decision 
and not a well reasoned one. There is a default reasoning that someone else's data 
records are much more accurate than their own is the source of the problem. Even
worse is the willingness to amend or append records with the data found in another
database.  This leads to data once discovered to be in error and correct being re-
populated into systems of records because of the cycle created by data matching.

There is also the issue of purge list matching with felony conviction records that 
demonstrates the problem of taking one list created for one purpose and trying to apply 
it to another list created for another purpose.  Accuracy of court records is worth doing 
more research into and hopefully making the case for data accuracy rules should apply.

Lillie Coney
Associate Director
Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) 
Defend Privacy. Support EPIC. 
http://epic.org/epic/support.html
1718 Connecticut Avenue NW Suite 200
Washington, D.C.
http://epic.org/
202-483-1140 x 111




On Jul 12, 2012, at 11:07 AM, Lorraine Minnite wrote:

> The counter-point is more important with respect to voting.  In recent testimony before the House Committee on Ways and Means Subcommittee on Social Security, the Inspector General of the Social Security Administration reported that “we in the OIG…remain concerned with the overall accuracy of the SSA’s death data,” stating that “…there are about 1,000 cases each month in which a living individual is mistakenly included in the DMF.”   A 2008 audit found that between January 2004 and April 2007, there were 20,623 individuals erroneously listed as dead on the SSA Death Index.  There is almost no evidence of voter impersonation in which there is a deliberate effort to fraudulently vote in the the name of a deceased person still on the voter rolls (the few cases of elderly voters sending in the absentee ballots of their recently departed spouses, notwithstanding).  We want clean registration lists, but from the standpoint of voting rights, the latter problem with the SSA death index is more troubling because it could result in legitimate voters being erroneously purged. 
> 
> Lori Minnite
> 
> On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 9:45 AM, Doug Hess <douglasrhess at gmail.com> wrote:
> Just more evidence of complications that show how fragile list
> matching is and why it takes time to clean and how careful one has to
> be...one wonders what the counter-point of this problem is: by that I
> mean, people declared dead that are not (i.e., people with matching
> names, DOBs, etc.).
> 
> "Social Security Administration did not properly record 1.2 million
> deaths, auditors find" Washington Post, July 12, 2012,
> 
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/post/social-security-administration-did-not-properly-record-12-million-deaths-auditors-find/2012/07/11/gJQAF4SydW_blog.html?wpisrc=nl_fedinsider
> 
> "A new report says the Social Security Administration failed to
> properly record the deaths of 1.2 million Americans on a list that is
> distributed to federal agencies and private companies, making it
> likely that their families or others wrongly received benefits after
> they died. ..."
> 
> -Doug
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