A voter registration group with a history of sending error-ridden mailers has again sown confusion in Virginia, this time tapping into concerns about mail-in ballots sparkedby President Trump’s repeated allegations — without evidence — of election fraud.
The Washington-based Center for Voter Information, a nonprofit geared toward increasing voter participation among underrepresented groups, mailed 2.25 million applications for absentee ballots to voters across the state, with a quarter of them containing a return envelope addressed to the wrong election office, the group said Thursday.
The computer error — which mixed up similarly named localities such as Fairfax County and the city of Fairfax — prompted a flurry of phone calls and emails to local election offices from voters convinced that they were the targets of a mail-in ballot fraud scheme….
The Center for Voter Information is actually nonpartisan, affiliated with the Voter Participation Center, another nonprofit working to increase voter participation. If anything, both organizations appear to be more aligned with efforts to defeat the president than with his allies.
They were founded by Page Gardner, a Democratic strategist who has worked on several presidential and congressional election campaigns, according to the groups’ websites. The chief executive of the Center for Voter Information is Tom Lopach, another veteran Democratic strategist. The organization raised $19 million in 2018 to increase voter participation among unmarried women, people of color and millennials, according to the center’s most recent federal tax filing.