Tag Archives: voter registration

Ground Game: LULAC Endorses Harris

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CBS News: The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the nation’s oldest and largest Latino civil rights organization with a membership-base of over 130,000 breaks with a 90-year tradition and endorses Harris.

“LULAC has a formidable grassroots operation in key battleground states — not just the ones in the Southwest, a senior source in the organization tells CBS News.”

The N.Y. TImes adds that the endorsement which is from the group’s political action committee followed a unanimous vote. And more from CBS News:

  • “More than 36.2 million Latinos will be eligible to cast ballots for president this year, the highest in electoral history, according to Pew.”
  • Latino voting strength is growing in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
  • “Nearly one in four voters in Arizona is Latino.”
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“Marjorie Taylor Greene’s and Brad Raffensperger’s Voter Registrations Targeted in Georgia’s New Online Portal”

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ProPublica:

On Friday, four days after Georgia Democrats began warning that bad actors could abuse the state’s new online portal for canceling voter registrations, the Secretary of State’s Office acknowledged to ProPublica that it had identified multiple such attempts — including unsuccessful efforts to cancel the registrations of two prominent Republicans, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

The confirmation of the attempts to misuse the portal follows separate discoveries by The Associated Press and The Current that the portal suffered at least two security glitches that briefly exposed voters’ dates of birth, the last four digits of their Social Security numbers and their full driver’s license numbers — the exact information needed to cancel others’ voter registrations.

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“Kansas stops enforcing a law against impersonating election officials”

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AP: 

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas is no longer enforcing a 3-year-old law making it a felony to impersonate election officials as it faces a legal challenge from critics who argue that the law has hindered efforts to register new voters.

Attorneys for the state and groups suing over the law agreed on stopping its enforcement, and District Judge Teresa Watson in Shawnee County, home to the state capital of Topeka, issued an order earlier this week ratifying their agreement. . . . .

The groups challenging the law argue it’s so vague that volunteers who register voters could face criminal charges if someone mistakenly believes they are election officials, even if those volunteers are clear that they aren’t verbally, in writing or on signs. State officials have scoffed at that argument, but groups curtailed their activities, including one involved in the lawsuit, Loud Light, which seeks to register young people.

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“How Some States Are Making It Harder to Register Voters”

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NYT:

LaVon Bracy has been registering Florida voters ever since Lyndon Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, because she wanted, she said, to give others the voice she was denied as a Black student in a largely white high school. In an average year, she said, the nonprofit Faith in Florida, where she serves as democracy director, used to add 12,000 new voters to the state’s rolls.

That ended last year, when Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation that imposed tough new rules on voter registration drives in the name of stopping fraud — and made voter registration groups that break the rules liable for fines as high as $250,000. . . .

As Democrats prepare for a sprint to capitalize on the excitement of a new presidential ticket by signing up new voters, they are finding entirely new barriers in Florida and some other states to the sorts of voter registration drives that have been a campaign staple for both parties.

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“Inside the right’s effort to build a voter fraud hunting tool”

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Jane Timm reports this important story for NBC News.

“Activists are currently testing a computer program called EagleAI NETwork, a database loaded with voter rolls and other records that promises to quickly churn through the data and find registrations that may be suspect based on other sources. The activists then personally evaluate the flagged voter registrations one by one — looking up home addresses on Google Maps, searching for obituaries online — and prepare lists of questionable registrations to report to local officials. …

 “’EagleAI presentations that I have seen are confused and seem to steer counties towards improper list maintenance activities,’ Blake Evans, Georgia’s elections director, said in a statement to NBC News. ‘EagleAI draws inaccurate conclusions and then presents them as if they are evidence of wrongdoing.’ …

“…Evans said the company is misunderstanding — and misconstruing — how list maintenance works, and painting typos and formatting differences, like typing a voter registration in all caps, as problems.

“’Eagle AI data offers zero additional value to Georgia’s existing list maintenance procedures,’ Evans added.

“’The results are going to vastly over-inflate potentially inaccurate voter registrations,’ said David Becker, an election expert who led the effort to create ERIC, which is run and financially supported by member states. 

And while he warned the election officials might get overwhelmed by reports, he’s most worried about the voters.

“’Imagine if you got a notice in the mail saying that your eligibility as a registered voter in the place where you live is being challenged for some uncertain reason. You have to actually physically present yourself … to prove you are who you are and that you’re entitled to vote where you always voted,’ he said. ‘That could happen with not a handful of people, but with potentially thousands.’”

The story discusses how this is being developed as an alternative to ERIC and goes on to describe Cleta Mitchell’s involvement with the project.

The concern with excessive eligibility challenges of this nature are clear. It’s similar to the overuse of FOIA-type request we saw with election administration records after 2020. Inundation of the system overloads the system and it’s like a denial-of-service attack.

On the other hand, we obviously have a huge trust-deficit problem in this country right now with respect to election administration. And while the attack on ERIC seemed entirely unjustified to me, we need something to replace it that’s workable and acceptable to both sides of the polarized partisan divide on the topic of election administration. While the analogy to the North Ireland peace accord is not perfect, the basic point is elections necessarily involve competition between the left and the right, and we have got to figure out a way to make that competition appear transparent and fair and trustworthy to the two competing teams.

I will be curious to hear what Charles Stewart, among others, thinks about the best way forward on this issue in what seems to be inevitably, whether we like it or not, a post-ERIC world.

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New Civic Center Study–“In Arizona’s two largest counties, fewer than 15% of 18-year-olds are registered to vote

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New research by Laura W. Brill at the Civics Center shows struggles to register young voters in Arizona.

“[F]ewer than 15% of 18-year-old residents of Arizona’s most populous counties, Maricopa County and Pima County, have registered to vote.”

These trends are concerning insofar as registration remains a key predictor of voter turnout. Arizona is no exception.

“Census records show that in the 2020 presidential election, 88% of registered Arizonans ages 18-24 cast ballots. That was 327,000 voters, and the margin of victory was just 10,457 votes in the Arizona presidential election.”

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