Cross posted at Project Vote’s Voting Matters Blog
As history has shown, there is a difference between submitting a voter registration application and finding your name on the rolls when you go to vote. With registration coming to a close, Project Vote is conducting emergency efforts to ensure that no one who wants to vote is left out on Election Day.
Project Vote’s Registration Repair Program is an intensive and urgent effort to collect and rectify large numbers of registrations that have been rejected by boards of election. We have been working all over the country to obtain disqualified applications and to contact would-be voters to repair applications with missing or erroneous information.
Check www.ProjectVote2008.org to see if your county has disqualified applications
Project Vote offers a Web site to help voters to check if they, their friends or neighbors were rejected by election authorities because of alleged or actual deficiencies in their application. Unless these people have already fixed the problem or filed another, corrected application, they will not be able to vote in November. The lists are available at www.ProjectVote2008.org. Currently featured states include Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. Check back often as lists will be updated with more information in coming days.
Given that many of these counties have registration deadlines this Monday, we encourage voters to ensure they are not excluded from the voter rolls. Voters who discover they are not registered may fix the problem immediately by calling or visiting the local elections office to file a new, correct registration. This must be done before the Oct. 6 deadline to ensure all citizens who thought they registered to vote may cast a ballot on Election Day.
For more information on how to file a new, correct application, call these voter hotlines, provided by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law: 866 OUR VOTE (866 687-8683) or 888 VE Y VOTA (888 839-8682).
No other organization is conducting such an effort to save registrations that have fallen through the bureaucratic cracks. Several boards of election have been cooperative, recognizing the importance of ensuring that every American who wants to vote is able to vote. In other cases, however, Project Vote is being met with reluctance, resistance, or outright refusal from election boards who seem content to allow thousands of would-be voters to turn up on Election Day and find that they’ve been left off the rolls.
Note: It is a violation of law in many states to use any of the information on any of these lists for commercial purposes.
