voter registration

What I'm reading today:

• The American Prospect looks at the good and the bad behind Obama's takeover of the DNC.
• A companion piece looks at the 15 most important advisors behind the Obama operation.
• Chris Bowers examines the demographic trends behind Obama's coalition and declares an end to the era of Values Voters and "Bubba Dominance."
• WireTap profiles Tony Peyton, the youngest member of the Pennsylvania House, and how the Center for Progressive Leadership helped shape him into a winning candidate.
• John McCain is trying to steal credit for the new GI Bill, which he actively opposed and obstructed.
• Bondelli explains how you can build your own Sprout Widget.
• The Voto Latino blog pointed me to this GQ profile of Meghan McCain from back in March. It's so vacuous at times that can't decide if it is a terrible profile or sheer genius on the part on the part of the McCain campaign. The girl did go to Columbia. What do you think?
• If, like me, you've been mesmerized by HBO's Generation Kill, you should check out the original Rolling Stone article by Evan Wright.
• Youth are a prime target in the Indiana Governor's race.
• Gawker thinks that MSNBC is trending Democratic and will continue to do so as it rakes in younger viewers.
• The Virginia Pilot notes that 2/3 of the 200,000 newly registered voters in the state are under the age of 35. The paper declares voter registration the new youth movement. I couldn't agree more.

The New York Times writes about the transition for some some young ex-Clinton staffers now working for Obama in Chicago.

A piece in the Flint (MI) Journal examines new social networking and media tools and their connection to an increase in youth political engagement this fall. Unfortunately, this article includes an example of the Republican strategic pessimism regarding the youth vote:

Facebook won't win any elections, said Harry Awdey, president of UM-Flint's College Republicans.

"We're trying to energize who we have out there but a lot of young people aren't going to vote," he said. "It seems like every couple of years they say it's going to be the year of the youth vote and it hasn't been yet.

"I'd like to think people are more civilly engaged but it's really that voter participation was so low that it had nowhere to go but up."

Nate Silver (of FiveThirtyEight.com fame) pens a good, if simple op-ed in the New York Post on the importance of the youth vote to Obama and why a surge in youth turnout appears likely this November.

Another piece -- this one in the Pioneer Press (MN) -- examines the paradox of a young, technology-obsessed McCain supporter supporting a 71 year old man who doesn't do email. Here's a sneak peek:

Andy Brehm is an e-mailaholic who frequently logs onto his Facebook social networking page to chat with his friends over the Web.

But the man he wants to be the nation's next president doesn't do any of those things.

Brehm, 27, a recent law school graduate, is as tech savvy as they come. John McCain, 71, the presumptive Republican nominee, once said he's never done "a Google."

...

"To be honest, I'd rather the president not spend his time e-mailing," Brehm said. "There are more important things to deal with. This country has some real serious problems that big government and higher taxes aren't going to fix."

A localized example of the surge in Democratic registrations this year: Boulder, Colorado.

Reuters speculates whether hip-hop could help or burden Barack Obama.

Bumped. -Craig

Cross-posted at Project Vote's blog Voting Matters

By Nathan Henderson-James

Just yesterday we noted the right way to report on charges of voter fraud and the wrong way to go about it. We explained how the news media had been gamed by people with a partisan interest in the outcome of elections to gin up hysteria to engage in voter intimidation and voter disenfranchisement efforts.

Well, the partisans are back at it in Wisconsin, but this time the press is following the lead of Virginia journalists and scrutinizing the claims rather than simply reprinting the press release.

Here’s the backstory. The community organization ACORN has recently completed a voter registration drive in Milwaukee aimed at historically disenfranchised populations like low-income folks and African-Americans. The drive assisted voters complete some 35,000 cards. So far so good.

However, some of ACORN’s canvassers were caught forging cards in order to get paid for not doing the work. Under Wisconsin law all cards filled out, completely or incompletely, fraudulently or not, are required to be turned in. Out of the 35,000 cards, ACORN and Board of Elections officials estimate that about 1500-2000 of them had problems. The bulk of those were simple incompletes, but about 200 or so were clearly attempts by canvassers to defraud both ACORN and the state of Wisconsin by submitting false cards.

The traditional media has actually done a fairly good job reporting the story, going into great detail on how the cards were caught, the quality control procedures used by ACORN, and the context of the numbers involved versus the total number of cards submitted. This reportage has been ably supplemented by bloggers like Cory Liebmann at One Wisconsin Now and Capper at Cognitive Dissonance.

But, of course, this situation has served as an opportunity for conservative partisans to immediately pick up their calls for voter disenfranchisement policies such as voter ID. Such a policy would ironically, or perhaps not so ironically, actually push down the voter participation rates among those folks who most rely on voter registration drives to bring them into the civic participation process.

Here’s choice quote from Pete DiGaudio who writes as The Texas Hold ‘Em Blogger,

“Well, yes, I actually do support voter suppression. I am in favor of suppressing the vote of dead people, nonexistent people, convicted felons, illegal aliens, people voting more than once, et al. Every time one of these people votes, it cancels out my legitimate vote.

A simple thing like photo ID for voting would eliminate these fraudulent voters when they showed up at the polls.”

Project Vote’s report The Politics of Voter Fraud (PDF) has consistently pointed out that there simply isn’t widespread voter fraud in the United States and any fraudulent voting has never been tied to voter registration fraud, which is what has partisans so breathless and hyperbolic.

But the rush to point to a solution like voter ID seems not to be bothered by facts. Like the fact that the so-called fraud every partisan points to is always centered on voter registration cards. Well, voter ID isn’t going to stop canvassers from wanting to get paid for not doing the work and it isn’t going to stop states like Wisconsin from requiring that every card be turned in regardless of its accuracy, completeness, or legitimacy and it’s definitely not going to help elections officials catch bad cards.

The truth is that the laws as written and enforced catch such problems. The mere fact of this story in the media means the system in Milwaukee works the way it is supposed to, catching problem cards. Voter ID, on the other hand stops something called “voter impersonation”, which just doesn’t happen in the Untied States. Of the 24 convictions won by the US Department of Justice between 2002 and 2005 for voter fraud, most of them were for problems with submitting false or illegal absentee ballots. Voter ID laws do nothing to fix this problem. But what they are great at is stopping otherwise eligible voters from casting ballots.

And that’s how it works – raise loud cries of outrage over an illegal act that was caught using the safeguards that were put in place for just that situation, raise questions about the integrity of the entire elections system, and offer a solution that would not stop the identified problem and would, in fact, stop significant numbers of specific groups, generally groups who are already the most disenfranchised, from participating in elections.

A story in The New York Times notes that drastic changes in the partisan make-up of the voter rolls bodes well for Democrats this year and may produce - dare we say it - a political realignment.

In several states, including the traditional battlegrounds of Nevada and Iowa, Democrats have surprised their own party officials with significant gains in registration. In both of those states, there are now more registered Democrats than Republicans, a flip from 2004. No states have switched to the Republicans over the same period, according to data from 26 of the 29 states in which voters register by party. (Three of the states did not have complete data.)

In six states, including Iowa, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, the Democratic piece of the registration pie grew more than three percentage points, while the Republican share declined. In only three states — Kentucky, Louisiana and Oklahoma — did Republican registration rise while Democratic registration fell, but the Republican increase was less than a percentage point in Kentucky and Oklahoma. Louisiana was the only state to register a gain of more than one percentage point for Republicans as Democratic numbers declined.

What's happening here? A number of things, according to the article. First, there is an increase in Democratic registrations, but more significantly, there is a huge decrease in Republican registrations (and a corresponding increase in "independent" registrations). These changes are already having an impact up and down the ticket:

In the 26 states and the District of Columbia where registration data were available, the total number of registered Democrats increased by 214,656, while the number of Republicans fell by 1,407,971.

The unsettled political ground has manifested itself in state and local elections. Twenty-three state legislatures are controlled by Democrats and 14 by Republicans, with 12 states with divided chambers (Nebraska has a nonpartisan legislature). After the 2000 election, 16 state legislatures were dominated by Democrats, and 17 by Republicans, with 16 divided.

It is a similar story in governors’ mansions. After the 2004 election, there were 28 Republican governors and 22 Democrats; those numbers are now reversed. After the 2000 election, there were only 19 Democratic governors.

Young people are playing a roll as well, and it's great to see a major political story get the story right - this is about more than excitement over Obama's candidacy:

In many states, Democrats have benefited from a rise in younger potential voters, after declines or small increases in the number of those voters in the 1980s and ’90s. The population of 18- to 24-year-olds rose from about 27 million in 2000 to nearly 30 million in 2006, according to Census figures.

Mr. Obama’s candidacy has drawn many young people to register to vote, and some of the recent gains by Democrats have no doubt been influenced by excitement over his campaign. But even before Mr. Obama’s ascendancy among Democrats, younger voters were moving toward the Democratic Party, demographers said.

Dowell Myers, a professor of policy, planning and development at the University of Southern California, also noted that a younger, native-born generation of Latinos who have a tendency to support Democrats is coming of age.

Further, young Americans have migrated in recent years to high-growth states that have traditionally been dominated by Republicans, like Arizona, Colorado and Nevada, which may have had an impact on the changing registration numbers in those places.

This is all great news, but one word of caution. Let's remember that the vast majority of these new young voters are college students. There's still a lot of work to do registering non-college students. These numbers should be a lot higher come October.

Those who read our diaries know Project Vote as the organization that fights voter suppression and helps election protection efforts. What you may not know is that in addition to being on the frontlines in the fight for voter rights, Project Vote is also the largest voter registration organization in the United States.

Since 2003 over one-third of all registration applications submitted through voter registration drives in the U.S. have come through Project Vote. In 2003-04 we submitted 1.13 million applications, in 2006 just over 547,000, and by Friday we will collect our 1,000,000th registration for 2007-08. Half of our registrants are under 30, and almost all of them are African-Americans or Latinos. One-third of them have never registered before in their lives.

With one month left in the drive we have 270,000 more registrations to collect and you can help!

Project Vote is proud of our achievements. No voter registration organization in U. S. history has been able to help register over a million low-income people for two presidential election cycles in a row. This success is a testament to our field partners, our state of the art project management system, and the generosity and commitment of our donors.

But our work is not yet finished. Our goal for the 2007-2008 election was 1.27 million voters, so we still have 270,000 more applications to collect in states such as Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. We are now one short month away from the end of our program and we need everyone’s help to finish the job.

In at least five states nationwide Project Vote will help register more voters than made up the margin of victory in the last presidential election: no matter how our registrants choose to vote, these last few votes will matter in a real and powerful way.

Rest assured that in addition to our record-breaking voter registration effort, our Elections Administration program will continue through Election Day to make sure our applicants and similarly situated applicants get on the voter rolls, can vote, and have their vote counted. In fact, we’ve been hard at work fighting voter purges in the South in recent days.

If you would like to reach out to Project Vote, you can contact us at 800-546-8683, 202-546-4173, or via e-mail at researchdirector@projectvote.org

OK - it's time to nudge your friends to vote...it's time to pester them about registering as frequently and lovingly as you bug them about going with you to the movies or to a party. And fortunately, "I Vote, You Vote" agrees it should be just as easy.

A recently-launched project of the American Democracy Institute and the National Campaign for Fair Elections, this site allows you to

• send email and text encouragement to friends;
• invite them to register;
• remind them to vote;
• track whether they've taken action.

That's right: you have your "My Voters" page which tells you which of your friends have followed through (they also tell me that they are savvy enough to prevent one person from receiving redundant invitations from multiple friends...I'm ambivalent on that -- maybe it cuts down annoyance, but hearing from multiple sources is a good way to feel peer pressure).

In another gutsy move, they have a public tracker of recent actions telling you who has been sending requests. Right now, this new system doesn't have a dramatic amount of use, but it will be fun: if it goes viral, that tracker will look more like a ticker.

I say it's gutsy because it's so transparent -- we can see whether people are actually using it or not. But that transparency is good for this kind of work. We should know what tools out there are useful.

There's the CREDO tool to register to vote online (which this system is built upon; there is VotePoke from MoveOn that allows you to check on your friends; and in NY, there's Voter Search, which allows you to check your registration and get info on the next elections. And last cycle, if I recall, Craig's List had a "register to vote" link (though they don't seem to right now).

Which of these work? Which are getting traffic? Which are becoming popular? Is it because they are easy? Fun? Convincing? Partisan or objective? Youth-oriented or general?

It's great to have another tool in the market -- one that's attractive and easy, gives you reason to return again and again, and makes everyone's actions so open.

Now, let's put it to use.

Cross-posted at Project Vote's Voting Matters Blog

Weekly Voting Rights News Update

By Erin Ferns

In 2000, Florida’s disastrous effort to purge former felons from voter rolls resulted in the disenfranchisement of hundreds if not thousands of legitimate voters and clearly influenced the outcome of the presidential contest in that state. History may repeat itself this November with states taking potentially reckless and unlawful measures to clean voter rolls before Election Day.

Voter purges are one of several problems in the administration of elections that could not only bar legal voters from the polls, but could potentially influence the outcome of close races. Project Vote is monitoring this practice across the United States and sees what could be an alarming trend of illegal purging emerging. The New York Times and Mississippi's Clarion Ledger both reported on voter purging problems in the South this week.

Keeping accurate and current voter rolls is an important legal mandate for election officials. Under the National Voter Registration Act, states are required to contact voters directly through forwardable mail. If the voter does not respond, the state must wait two federal elections before removing the voter from the rolls. However, many states have begun to compare their voter rolls with those of neighboring states and pro-actively canceling a voter's registration based on a positive “match” rather than following the list maintenance procedures of NVRA.

Project Vote has recently expressed concern to Louisiana Secretary of State Jay Dardenne over the state's method of removing voters from rolls, as reported in the Times on Tuesday. Project Vote has learned that Louisiana compares voter lists with other jurisdictions, purging voters solely upon apparent database matches of first name, last name and birth date. With millions of people living in a multi-state region, it is not uncommon to find more than one John Smith born on the same day. Additionally, the possibility of human and typographical error that occur in all large databases creates a greater risk of unjustified disenfranchisement.

“A spokesman for Louisiana's secretary of state said that all voters found to have duplicate registrations were sent at least one warning letter and sometimes two, but that the last such actions were done some 13 months ago,” the Times reported.

“'We're specifically not doing it right in front of an election,'” said Dardenne's spokesman.
Election officials in Madison County, Miss. have recently decided to forgo a potentially illegal mass mailing process as part of their effort to purge the county’s voter rolls after the U.S. Justice Department and others warned against it, according the Clarion Ledger Tuesday. Last week, Project Vote sent a letter to the elections commission out of concern that their mass mailing plan violated the Voting Rights Act.

“They are doing something that is understandable when you have a voter roll that appears to be out of proportion,” said voting rights lawyers who works with Project Vote, Estelle Rogers. “But there are a lot of Ps and Qs that must be followed.”

County supervisor Karl Banks repeatedly voted against the mass mailing, saying that “his understanding of the law was that commissioners needed a reason to believe that a voter's information may not be accurate.” He argued that in this presidential election year, the commission should focus on making sure elections run smoothly, such as informing people of their correct precinct.

“The mildest things confuse people and can ultimately disenfranchise people during elections...Here we are wanting to disenfranchise people because they don't send a card back?”

The emerging trend of state compacts to compare voter databases and engage in aggressive efforts to purge their voter rolls is troubling for both its opacity – the public is not informed of the criteria for being purged nor are purged voters offered the chance to remedy the situation – and its reliance on strict matching criteria. Large databases are riddled with errors, therefore the sole reliance on exact matches virtually guarantees that legal voters will be knocked off the rolls and denied the right to vote.
The Florida example from 2000 should be instructive on on how these practices could affect the outcome of closely contested races on Election Day.

Quick Links:

Contact:

Louisiana Secretary of State Jay Dardenne

Madison County (Miss.) Board of Supervisors

Reports:

“Maintaining Current and Accurate Voters Lists.” Project Vote. Dec. 22, 2006.

“A Summary of the National Voter Registration Act.” Project Vote.

“A Summary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.” Project Vote.

In Other News:

Federal judge weighs challenge to AZ voter id law - Tucson Citizen [Ariz.]
PHOENIX (AP) -- A federal judge is weighing a challenge to Arizona requirements for voter identification and proof of citizenship for registering to vote.

County voter drive blocked: Fewer New Citizens Registered After US Agency Changes Rule - Mercury News [Ca.]
It was a procedure that produced a bumper crop of new voters: Just before Santa Clara County immigrants were sworn in as U.S. citizens, they got voter-registration cards and were shown how to fill them out. At the conclusion of the naturalization ceremony, most new citizens had signed the cards and handed them in to become registered voters.

State Says It May Sue VA - Associated Press
Connecticut officials say the state might sue the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs if it continues to block efforts to educate and register voters in federal veterans' facilities.

Voter-sign-up drive targets 16-year olds - Miami Herald
Voter registration for next month's primary election will end Monday, and the push now is aimed at teens who are too young to cast a ballot

Erin Ferns is a Research and Policy Analyst with Project Vote’s Strategic Writing and Research Department (SWORD).

The Tampa Tribune criticized ACORN in an opinion piece that ran on Saturday July 19th for putting Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning on notice that the state of Florida was not in compliance with the 1993 National Voter Registration Act. According to the act, voter registration assistance must be provided not only at the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) but at all agencies that provide public assistance (such as Medicaid and food stamps). A recent study released by Project Vote, ACORN, and Demos showed that Florida’s percentage of registrations from public-assistance agencies dropped from 9% in 1995 and 1.8% in 2007.

Instead of calling for the state to comply with the Federal law, an action most citizens can find little fault with, – after all, Americans pride themselves on living in a nation built on laws – the Tribune launches into a litany of excuses for illegal behavior.

The paper defends the state, saying that it is already doing all it can through the DMV to register voters and calling ACORN’s description of the state’s illegal behavior a civil rights issue “nonsense”.

This characterization is itself nothing but nonsense clumsily camouflaged behind a disingenuous and contextless statistic regarding the number of Floridians receiving cash assistance and a hilariously ironic reference to community-based voter registration drives.

First, let us tediously remind our good friends on the Tampa Tribune editorial board that Section 7 of the NVRA requires all public assistance agencies, not just those handing out cash assistance, to be responsible, like those exemplary DMV employees, for offering clients the opportunity to register. If the DMV can keep a steady stream of applications rolling in, one wonders why the folks administering the Medicaid program, a program not counted as “cash assistance”, can’t do that same.

Second, while it is true that Project Vote and ACORN have been at the forefront of assisting low-income families register to vote in Florida, it is also true that even at their most efficient and wide-spread these drives reach only a fraction of Florida’s unregistered voters. For example, in 2006 Florida had over 4.2 million eligible unregistered voters according to Project Vote’s 2007 report on the 2006 electorate called Representational Bias. In 2004, over the course of the state’s largest voter registration drive ever, ACORN assisted just over 200,000 voters register to vote. By simply following the law, Florida could register far more voters than most voter registration drives combined.

But getting into a back-and-forth over the exact number of folks who have been affected by Florida’s disregard of the law obscures a fact that should be obvious to even the Tribune’s editorial board: Florida’s actions are illegal whether they’ve failed to offer registration opportunities to one voter or to 100,000. The fact that the editorial board of any newspaper, let alone one of the largest in the Sunshine State, would, in the 21st century, condone and defend illegal activities related to the enforcement of civil rights laws is, quite frankly, shocking.

We can only hope that once an enforcement action is filed the judges reviewing the case show a greater understanding than does the Tampa Tribune of the difference between following the law and flouting it.

Contact Information:

Tampa Tribune:

Tampa Bay Online Office:
813-259-8225 or 1-800-527-2773
Loren Omoto, Director of Content
lomoto@tbo.com

Click here to write a letter to the Tampa Tribune editor

Kurt Browning:

Secretary of State
Florida Department of State
R. A. Gray Building
500 South Bronough Street
Tallahassee, FL 32399-0250

Telephone: 850.245.6500
Fax: 850.245.6125
secretaryofstate@dos.state.fl.us

Florida Secretary of State Website

So, I'm finally settled back in. Here's the rest of those Quick Hits I didn't get to while at the Austin airport, as well as a few more that have accumulated since.

• The Austin Statesman picked up our little youth caucus, but seemed to miss the point. The caucus was an informal meeting, not a strategy session to construct a master youth plan. And the focus of the discussion - to what extent our youth movement needed to be about GOTV and infrastructure for organizing our peers, or building an ideological consensus - was barely touched on in his piece.
• In this piece by The Washington Post, 29 year old Republican tech strategist David All confirms the complete disconnect between the GOP and Millennials. My favorite line:
  

  David All points to a page on McCain's Web site as more old-fogy branding:

• PEW reports that young voters in this election are at least - if not more - knowledgeable about the candidates' position on Iraq.
• Anderson Cooper's ac360 blog profiles HeadCount and their latest work at the Camp Bisco festival.
• The Virginia Pilot reports that young Viginians (under 25) are registering at twice the rate of their elders. Registration has increased 10% in the last year.
• Rumors abound that Barack Obama is going to show up as a surprise guest at this year's Lollapalooza, which takes place in his hometown of Chicago.
• Young People For just announced the new class of their Front Line Leaders Academy.
• Nine Latino organizations are teaming up to spend $5 million on a nonpartisan voter registration effort targeting 2 million Latinos.
• Finally, Rock the Vote is teaming up with Comcast in its effort to register 2 million new voters this election cycle. I'm not a fan of this partnership. Last year, Comcast was caught blocking internet traffic from peer to peer networks. They are on the wrong side of the Net Neutrality debate.

Congrats to the super awesome Jackie V who won the first round of artists who won the DemROCKracy Band Competition!

If you don't know Jackie V you are missing out. She's 18 years old this year and has gone above and beyond to register voters on her MySpace page as well as in her community. She's been playing the piano since she was a little girl and now plays some edgy pop with a jazz twist all over Austin, Texas.

We caught up with Jackie today to present her with her beautiful new Gibson Guitar and encourage her to keep up the good work to get to the big Rock the Vote Concert Extravaganza in August!

Check out Jackie as she receives her guitar:

Crossposted from Rock the Trail