The New Voters Project smells like vote fraud. (Hat tip to mjfdl)
New Voters Project registers 74,000 young people in state
(Published Thursday, September 9, 2004 10:31:29 AM CDT)
By Dan Hinkel/Gazette Staff
The New Voters Project, a national grassroots youth voter mobilization initiative, announced last week that it has registered 74,000 young people to vote in Wisconsin.
That's a lot of new registrants in a swing state that tipped to Vice President Al Gore by less than 6,000 votes in 2000.
However, the registrant boom comes with an asterisk. City clerks from around the state and Rock County have said that many of the registrations are missing an important piece of information.
Rock County Clerk Kay O'Connell said local clerks are dealing with loads of forms from the non-partisan project that don't include necessary copies of registrant identification, such as Wisconsin driver's licenses.
"It's causing a lot of confusion for the clerks," she said. She also noted that the new registrants aren't done with the process either.
"They're just going to have to do it all over again," she said.
New rules call for prospective voters to give more information when they register. Municipalities that register voters are keeping records of driver's licenses or Social Security numbers.
Because most of the project's staffers aren't deputized by clerks to register voters, most would need to include a copy of the prospective voter's identification to finish the registration process. The state prefers a Wisconsin driver's license.
New Voters Project Wisconsin Field Director Bruce Speight said there is nothing incomplete about the forms. He said the group is sticking to guidelines from the State Elections Board and local clerks.
Speight said he understands that the project has dumped stacks of new registrations on clerks. But he said his staffers aren't committing a faux pas by not including the IDs.
"It's a very standard process to complete a form, mail it in, and then bring an ID with them to the polls," he said..
...
>>Wulf said the New Voters Project is also unnecessarily registering voters.
She said 21 percent of the forms Janesville has received are from people who are already registered.<<
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