We’re all familiar with the chaos that occurs in a close election. Recounts are demanded, candidates lawyer up, election officials work frantically to count ballots, and the community is held in limbo while awaiting election results. We saw this in Florida with the Bush-Gore presidential election, and we certainly saw it closer to home after the 2004 gubernatorial election.

These close elections are especially chaotic when fraud or other inaccuracies are discovered. Illegal or improper votes shatter voters’ confidence and this can be very harmful to our system of democracy, which relies on citizen participation.

Recognizing this, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act in 2002, directing secretaries of state to create and maintain a statewide voter registration list of every eligible voter. Election officials are to maintain an accurate voter list and are directed to remove ineligible voters from the list.

Accurate voter registration procedures are critical in a state like Washington where nearly every county conducts its election system through a vote-by-mail process. Any inaccurate entries could result in sending out ballots to ineligible voters (or sending multiple ballots to legitimate voters).

This is why we sued Secretary of State Sam Reed over the state’s voter registration procedures.

A person must be 18 to vote in Washington, although state law allows young people to register as long as they will be 18 by the next election. Yet in reviewing the voter rolls, EFF researchers discovered thousands of young people who were apparently registered to vote before they were eligible.

This is happening because the Secretary of State allows county auditors to accept voter applications from underage applicants. Say a 16-year-old gets his driver’s license. At the same time he is given the opportunity to register to vote—even if he won’t be 18 by the next election. In this situation, county auditors are “pending” these registrations. Some do this by entering the information into the voter database as a pended entry, while other auditors use what they call a “manual hold” — they drop the registrations in a file and process them when the voter is eligible to vote.

Election officials say this process is adequate, yet somehow scores of young people are added to the voter list as “active” voters, and many of them are receiving and casting ballots. We discovered more than 125 votes from underage teens over an eight year period. In one case, a young woman was on the voter rolls at least 17 months before her 18th birthday and she managed to vote twice in that time period.

This is a simple problem, with a simple solution. Election officials should not accept registration cards from underage teens. Rather, they should send the young person home with a card and invite that person to send in the card when they’re old enough.

But Secretary Reed doesn’t want to do this. He argued the underage registrations we found are clerical “illusions” — that they didn’t really happen. He also said election law doesn’t require him to prevent these registrations, but only to correct inaccuracies if they come to his attention. Finally, he argued he has a duty to promote civic involvement among young people and that turning away underage registrants will discourage potential voters who may never return to exercise their right to vote.

With lax standards like these, it’s no wonder organizations intent on committing voter fraud are successful.

Secretary Reed should certainly encourage every eligible voter to vote. But an illegal vote cancels out a legitimate one, and there is nothing in state or federal law that supports underage registration. Young people today are well acquainted with reaching an age of eligibility for many activities. What’s more discouraging to a teenager—being told he or she is too young to register to vote, or registering and later discovering he or she has committed voter fraud because an adult didn’t enforce the rules?

Unfortunately, Thurston County Superior Court Judge Anne Hirsch ruled against us last month, saying that the Secretary of State’s procedures are adequate and haven’t resulted in too many illegal votes. We are now looking at an appeal. Accurate election results are only possible if we have procedures in place that minimize human error and voter fraud.

If we can’t trust the outcome, what’s the point of voting? In the words of Pete Townsend, “We won’t get fooled again.”

Steven Maggi is the vice president of communications for the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, a free-market policy organization in Olympia.