Advocacy Group Overstated Tally of New Voters

October 24, 2008

Advocacy Group Overstated Tally of New Voters

Contrary to an earlier announcement by Acorn and an affiliated charity, called Project Vote, the real number of newly registered voters nationwide is around 450,000 — not 1.3 million, reports The New York Times.

Project Vote’s executive director, Michael Slater, said in an interview that the remainder includes registered voters who were simply changing their addresses, as well as nearly 400,000 names that were rejected by election officials for a variety of violations, including duplicate registrations, incomplete forms, and fraudulent submissions.

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Here’s what ACORN’s director, Steve Kest, says:

“We are puzzled by today’s New York Times article. It has always been our position that we collected over 1.3 million registration applications. We have always said that we identified potentially problematic cards. The core responsibility of local boards of elections has been and continues to be to determine which registration cards are duplicates, which are new registrants, and which are people that changed their addresses. The Times article mistakenly assumes that much of the impact that voter registration drives are designed to have – enabling people to change their addresses so they are able to vote on Election Day – is of no value. In the end, after taking into account these change of address registration applications, nearly one million people we helped to register will be eligible to vote on Election Day because of our work.

“Our best estimate is that of the 1.3 million voter registration cards ACORN collected, approximately:

(1) 450,000 of our registrants are expected to be brand-new voters,

(2) 450,000 will be Americans who needed to update their registration information (e.g. change in address) in order to be eligible to vote in 2008. If they had not updated their voter registration information as the result of ACORN’s efforts they would either not be able to vote in 2008, or would have great difficulty voting — and having their vote counted.

(3) 300,000 will fail to match government systems, because they are incomplete or will be duplicates — people who did not realize they were already validly registered.

(4) Less than 2 percent will turn out to be deliberately falsified by canvassers. ACORN’s Quality Control system checks each card: whenever there was a phone number we made up to three attempts to call the applicant and verify information. In every case where ACORN found a bogus application or missing information we flagged that for election officials.

“(These are estimates based on studies of past voter registration drives – ours and others – and samples for our current work. There is no way to know the final outcome of all the registration applications submitted until after election officials are done with their work and updated voter rolls are published and can be analyzed.)

“Project Vote and ACORN have been open and forthcoming about these numbers throughout our drive, and in fact provided the same facts to New York Times reporter Shaila Dewan for a story that appeared on June 15th of this year about a different group’s voter registration drive: ‘Michael Slater, the deputy director of Project Vote, said high numbers of incomplete applications were not unusual in such drives. He said as a rule of thumb, 35 percent of voter drive applications were new voters, 35 percent were change of address, and 30 percent were duplicates or incomplete.’ We have also made this point at various public discussions of our voter registration efforts.

“While we would love it if the American system of voter registration were so simple and accessible that every voter registration application we collect translated to another voter successfully getting on the rolls, we all know that this is not the case in the United States. For all the talk this season about Project Vote and ACORN ‘registering’ voters, it is important to note that nonprofits and community organizations do not have the final authority to register anyone. Only the government can register voters. What Project Vote and ACORN do is assist Americans in filling out registration applications and submitting them to election officials who make the final determination of their eligibility.”

— Charlie Bernstein Oct 24, 02:24 PM #

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