Saturday, September 25, 2004

New Voters

Ford Fessenden has a great article in the NYT (including a quote from yours truly) on the number of new voters being registered in swing states like Florida and Ohio. Fessenden includes the following data on Ohio:

In rock-ribbed Republican areas - 103 ZIP codes, many of them rural and suburban areas, that voted by two to one or better for George W. Bush in 2000 - 35,000 new voters have registered, a substantial increase over the 28,000 that registered in those areas in the first seven months of 2000. The Ohio Republican party said it was pleased with the results. . . . But in heavily Democratic areas - 60 ZIP codes mostly in the core of big cities like Cleveland, Dayton, Columbus and Youngstown that voted two to one or better against Mr. Bush - new registrations have more than tripled over 2000, to 63,000 from 17,000.

The reall question is whether these new voters will show up to vote. Studies of Motor Voter showed that persons signed up under its provisions were less likely to vote than those who registered the usual way. Also, there was no clear partisan advantage to Motor Voter since Democrats signed up by it were less likely to vote than Republicans.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

There is certainly a lot of people in the ABB (anybody but Bush) camp, some of whom are ready to go to extraordinary lengths in this election. Was the Dan Rather controversy one example (an attempt to influence the election) or simply sloppy journalism? Time will tell. Or not. But as regards new voter registration, this post on PowerlineBlog.com points to a possible reason for the astonishing numbers of new voters in certain areas--
Reader Thomas Chiappetti sent us a link to this piece by Mark Belling on the groundwork that the Democrats are laying to commit voter fraud on a massive scale in Wisconsin:

An outfit called the "New Voter Project" claims to be nonpartisan but is being bankrolled and staffed by leftists. The organization is already active in Wisconsin and already involved in trouble. Thousands of "voters" registered by this group in the last few weeks have submitted registration forms without the legally required proof of identification. This has forced village and city clerks all over the region to send out notices asking for the information.
Virtually none of the forms sent out by the local clerks to the shady registrants have been responded to. The only plausible explanation for that is that the "voters" not only aren’t voters but aren’t real people, either.

Here’s the method to the New Voter Project madness. In Wisconsin, you can register to vote at the polls on Election Day. You have to produce identification when you register. But sending in a phony registration in advance puts you on the voter list before the election. Already-registered voters don’t have to show any identification. By putting perhaps thousands of fake names on the voter lists, it will be possible for fraudsters to show up at the polls and simply claim to be the person who was already "registered."

One former employee of the New Voter Project has told me that many staffers simply took names out of the telephone book to fill out their daily quotas. He quit his job in fear there’d be a criminal investigation.

Now, the New Voter Project is turning in thousands of dubious voter registration forms and the organization is run by a woman who has already been linked to election fraud.