Voting Officials Target Problems, Solutions at Summit : Elections: New secretary of state seeks answers to voter fraud and registration ‘deadwood.’ Changes in laws could result.

SACRAMENTO —  In what might be a first step toward changes in California voting laws, new Secretary of State Bill Jones asked elections experts Wednesday to help him identify problems and suggest remedies for issues ranging from voter fraud to eliminating dead people from registration lists.

At what he labeled a one-day summit of local elections officials, county prosecutors and independent experts from throughout California, Jones found no shortage of issues, opinions and solutions.

Almost immediately, Beatriz Valdez, Los Angeles County registrar of voters, challenged the notion of massive fraud in voter registration. She said that isolated pockets of cheating have been found recently, but that fraud is insignificant compared to the millions of citizens legally registered to vote.

However, during a discussion of the vulnerability of absentee ballots to fraud, Wayne A. Ellison, assistant district attorney of Fresno County, cited the case a couple of years ago in which voter signatures were forged on absentee ballots.

The scheme involved sending the absentee ballots of the phony voters to addresses, a post office box and a business controlled by a political candidate, he said, noting that the perpetrators were caught and prosecuted.

Republican Jones, a former assemblyman from Fresno who defeated Democrat Tony Miller for secretary of state Nov. 8, listed voter fraud as one of the major issues he faces.

He said he sponsored the conference to get firsthand reports from local elections officials on overcoming complex issues such as “deadwood” on active registration rolls and tracking registrants under the federal “motor-voter” law.

Jones said he and a special panel of expert advisers that he appointed hope to recommend state and national legislation within 60 days.

Although Gov. Pete Wilson has challenged in court the implementation of the motor-voter law on grounds that the federal government failed to pay for it, Jones said the statute also may create enormous problems in tracking registrants. Generally, Republicans at both the state and national level dislike the motor-voter law, while Democrats favor it as a way to attract new voters.

Jones noted that the law requires the availability of voter registration materials at Department of Motor Vehicles branches and other government offices. But he said the law lacks a mechanism to track people who may sign up under names that vary slightly.

Likewise, Jones estimated that 15% to 20% of the 14.7 million registered voters in California, or up to 2 million people, are actually “deadwood”--people who died but whose names remain on voter registration lists. It is very difficult to expunge those names under the state’s current system, he said.