West Virginia’s Secretary of State serves as the state’s chief elections officer. With that title comes the responsibility to maintain a statewide voter registration list that is accurate and constantly updated.
When current WV Secretary of State Mac Warner took office, he pledged to clean up the state’s voter registration list. In doing that, he worked with the state’s 55 county clerks to take more than 400,000 deceased, duplicate, out-of-state, and convicted felon voter files off the lists. Those 400,000 voter files represented one in every six registrations in the statewide system.
In addition, Secretary Warner pledged in January 2017 to get young people involved in the political process by encouraging them to vote. He and his Field Team have been working with the county clerks to educate high school seniors on the election process and the right to vote.
On Wednesday, September 6th, Secretary Warner helped to register the 100,000th West Virginia high school senior to vote since he took office.
At a voter registration drive held Wednesday morning at Capital High School in Charleston, Secretary Warner joined Kanawha County Clerk Vera McCormick and WVSOS State Elections Director Brittany Westfall to commemorate the event. Also on hand was character actor Lee Dean who portrayed the late U.S. Senator Jennings Randolph of West Virginia. Senator Randolph is considered the “Father of the 26th Amendment” – the Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that reduced the voting age from 21 to 18.
The 100,000th student to register was Capital High School senior Rico Franquez (see photos below).
