Honest Voting

Voting Is Power, a massive voter registration drive that the Democratic party is running in Louisiana, has run into some potential problems because of complaints in certain parishes about poorly filled out or duplicate forms. When you look at registrars’ stories about the problems, though, the stories don’t add up. Any reader who’s done a compare-and-contrast exercise will notice that something’s off one way or the other. This writer, however, will come right out and say that it looks as though someone has done their best to foul up the registration drive from at least one end, and maybe both.

The registration drive, while its short-term goal was to register voters in time for a July 19th election, is ultimately aimed at beefing Democratic voter numbers for the November presidential vote. By Louisiana law the voter registrations have to be completely vetted by June 19th.

Shaila Dewan reported in Monday’s New York Times that the drive has raised complaints from some registrars about large numbers of duplicate, invalid or incomplete applications, and has led to an investigation by the Louisiana secretary of state, Jay Dardenne, a Republican.

The registrar in Jefferson, Dennis A. DiMarco, said that about 35 percent of the 4,000 cards his office had sorted were invalid because they had no address, the applicant was already registered or was a felon, or the signature did not match one on file at the Department of Motor Vehicles.* Another group of cards, he said, was missing information that the office hoped could be obtained by mail. DiMarco said he suspected that Voting Is Power canvassers were paid by the form. However, Brian Welsh, a spokesman for Louisiana Victory, the umbrella group coordinating local and national Democratic voter drives, said in a June 7th New Orleans Times-Picayune article that no, the canvassers are paid by the hour no matter how many forms they hand in.

Election officials have expressed concern that large numbers of people who believe they are registered will show up at the polls in November, only to find that they cannot vote because their application had been improperly submitted.

In Louisiana, the biggest complaints about the drive have come from Republican registrars in Caddo Parish, which includes Shreveport; East Baton Rouge Parish, which includes Baton Rouge; and Jefferson Parish, just outside New Orleans.

However, in Orleans Parish the registrar, Sandra Wilson, said she had received more than 19,000 Voting Is Power applications and had problems with only about 400 of them. There are 4,000 to 5,000 that have not yet been sorted. If the card is missing information but has a phone number, she said, “We immediately call that person and get what we need.”

Compare and contrast information from the two stories. DiMarco was already complaining about problematic registrations by June 7th; Wilson was overwhelmed but happy to get the registrations. A week later, DiMarco’s complaints have sparked an investigation from the secretary of state, a fellow Republican; also, DiMarco says that they’ll “try” to send mail to voters with incomplete forms. Wilson, however, noticed a far lower percentage of incomplete or false registrations, and says her office will simply telephone people to fill in the information gaps.

Either someone deliberately flooded DiMarco’s office with fake registrations, or they’re paying unusually close attention, shall we say, to the registrations coming into his office.

Meanwhile, eager to help, Secretary of State spokesman Jacques Berry cautioned people to register directly with government officials, not workers who approach them on the street. In other words, don’t do anything to help the Democratic voter registration drive. Oddly enough, this story has already started to show up in conservative PR outlets like WorldNetDaily. What a coincidence!

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*Uh, wait — who’s doing the signature matching? And let me get this straight, they *match signatures to your driver’s license*? Goodness, that doesn’t make me uncomfortable at all. My own signature varies depending on the type of writing instrument and the writing angle.

For what it’s worth, signature matching depresses voter turnout (check near the end of the linked article) — that is, it doesn’t catch fraudulent voting, it means people are less likely to register in the first place, especially among less educated or lower-income voters..

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