Forms confuse some registered voters
Posted on Sunday, March 23, 2008
Voter registration applications causing confusion among registered voters are coming from Boston, not the county or state, Washington County Clerk Karen Combs Pritchard said.
The Voter Participation Center is sending voter registration applications to registered and nonregistered voters. Even though these registration applications are legitimate, Pritchard said, they can be duplicative.
Some language accompanying the applications states that they are offered to people "as a public service by the Voter Participation Center, a project of Women's Voices, Women Vote, which is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that encourages people to register and vote. "The mailing address is from Boston. Women's Voices, Women Vote is headquartered in Washington, D. C.
"Voting is important. Registering to vote is voluntary, but to vote, you must be registered. So please update your voter registration today," the application states.
Susan Johnson, communications director for Women's Voices, Women Vote, said the mailings are targeting single women.
"We work to encourage unmarried women to register and vote," Johnson said.
Pritchard said her office deals with the Voter Participation Center applications daily.
"When they started getting mailed out, we would get boxes of them," she said.
That was about the time of the presidential primary, she said. The number eventually decreased to about 25 to 30 a day.
The applications help nonregistered people register to vote, Pritchard said, but the majority sent back to the county come from registered voters, causing needless labor for office employees.
Employees in the office must take time to process the applications, often realizing that many people are already registered to vote.
"It's just a time-consuming process," Pritchard said.
Johnson said obtaining names for the mailings is supposed to keep registered voters from getting applications, but she conceded that registered voters can get them.
"It's not the norm," she said.
"We definitely do not want to create any more work for the already hardworking employees already registering people to vote."
She said obtaining names involves commercial and state voter lists.
"We get a commercial list from a vendor," she said. "People's names are on there from a variety of different sources."
If a person is on the commercial list, but not on the voter file for Arkansas, she said, that means they are not registered to vote and they receive voter registration applications.
If someone has moved, she said, they may get a voter registration form from the organization.
People may unsubscribe to mailings on www. voterparticipationcenter. org, where they can also find more information about the project, she said. The Web site gives some background about the organization, the voter registration effort and answers frequently asked questions.
The organization sent out 109, 308 voter registration applications to people in Arkansas in early February. At the end of that month, the organization sent 64, 000 applications to Arkansas residents, Johnson said.
The first mailing resulted in 5, 000 returns in Arkansas, something she said pleases the group.
Tim Humphries, legal counsel for the Arkansas Secretary of State's Office in Little Rock, said anybody can buy the state voter registration list.
"I think people buy the list every day," he said.
Humphries said the Secretary of State's office has received complaints about the applications.
What organization officials tell him, he said, is that "what they're doing is legal and proper"and that they plan to continue sending the applications.
"There's not really any way that we can try to get them to stop doing it," Humphries said.
The main complaint the Secretary of State's Office receives, he said, is that people receiving the forms already are registered to vote.
The bottom line for the clerk's office, Pritchard said, is residents' confusion.
"I just hate for people to get confused," she said. "If I didn't work in this every day, I'd probably be confused."
For those who have been registered to vote for years, she said, it is even more confusing because they think something is wrong with their status.
County clerk's office employees field daily phone calls from people wondering what the surveys are, Pritchard said.
"It worries them how someone got their name and address," she said. "It scares people, with all of the identity theft."
She said people should be careful about any mailings sent to them asking for their information if they do not know the source.
Pritchard advises registered voters who receive the Voter Participation Center applications to shred them, or, if in doubt, call the county clerk's office to make sure their voter registration is in the system properly.
Most people receiving the Voter Participation Center applications have been women, according to anecdotal information from county clerk's office personnel processing them, which, of course, mirrors the Women's Voices, Women Vote project to target single women.
The organization's targeted constituency includes single women who have never married, divorced or separated women and widows, Johnson said.
"This is our third election cycle. We were created in 2004," she said.
She spoke of a "marriage gap"in which unmarried women typically register and vote at a lower rate than married women do.
For the first time in the nation's history, she said, there are actually as many unmarried as married women in the country - about 53 million each.
"Unmarried women are 9 percentage points less likely to register and 13 percentage points less likely to vote than women that are married," Johnson said. "There's a bloc of our country that's not involved in the electoral process, and we're just trying to help bring a voice to their concerns."
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