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Group has
already added 15,000 'historically underrepresented" to Virginia voter rolls. 'Voter Participation Center' is busy across the country, here's
a dead dog invited to "register today!" in Washington State (photo below). On googling, "Voter Participation Center," this was the first item up: "
Voter Participation Center... Women Vote created the Voter Participation Center to register and motivate unmarried women, and other underrepresented groups to participate in the"...7/25/12,
"In Va. (Virginia), dogs and the dead are invited to vote," Washington Post, L. Vozzella
"
A group that tries to get “historically underrepresented groups” to the polls has targeted some particularly unlikely voters:
dogs and dead Virginians. The Voter Participation Center, a Washington-based nonprofit, also
sent voter registration forms to scores of noncitizens, children and other Virginians ineligible to vote, according to the Virginia State Board of Elections, which has received more than 100 complaints.
The mailings have revived talk of voter fraud in Virginia, a crucial swing state where President Obama and Republican candidate Mitt Romney are deadlocked in a recent poll. And it has prompted the Romney campaign to call for a criminal investigation.
“This presents a very significant risk to the proper administration of the upcoming general election,” Kathryn Biber, the campaign’s general counsel, said in a letter sent Tuesday to Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II (R) and the State Board of Elections.
The [Voter Participation] center said it used a commercial mailing list to target unregistered voters, and that it never meant to send forms to anyone ineligible to vote. It said the errant mailings, first reported by the Richmond Times-Dispatch, represent just a fraction of the nearly 200,000 it sent out across Virginia.
“The state forms are official applications, they are not registration cards,” the [Voter Participation] center said in a written statement issued Wednesday. “Furthermore, they were approved by the State Board of Elections before we sent them out and are the same applications that anyone can access at a local government office or on the Internet."...
- [Ed. note: A woman holds a piece of mail from this company which says in big letters,"Register to vote today!" The document was sent to the woman's dead dog (also pictured, AP photo, July 2012.]
(continuing, Wash. Post): "Our process is legal and working. 15,000 Virginians have submitted these registration applications and been added to the rolls by government officials - a start at whittling down the state’s 2 million unregistered [voters].”
But for some, the mailings have reignited fears that Virginia is vulnerable to voter fraud, a claim that was bitterly debated in the General Assembly this year. Citing concerns about the integrity of elections, the GOP-controlled General Assembly closed a loophole that had allowed voters to cast ballots without showing identification. Democrats charged that the voter ID law, while more moderate than those Republicans have recently pushed in other states, was intended to make it harder for minorities and other Democratic-leaning groups to vote.
State Sen. Thomas Garrett (R-Louisa), a Louisa County prosecutor who successfully tried two felons who registered to vote in 2009, said one of the two registered after receiving a form by mail from the Voter Participation Center. “Clearly they haven’t gotten the message,” Garrett said.
Page Gardner, the center’s president, said the [Voter Participation] center was only trying to encourage eligible voters to exercise their franchise. She said the group tries to make its mailing list “as perfect as possible.”
“We have nothing to do with that issue, voter fraud. We send people applications to fill out in the mail,” Gardner said. “It’s up to them to fill out the form and obey all the state laws and federal laws.”
The dead can wind up on a mailing list because it is compiled from things such as magazine subscriptions, which often are not updated with a new name when a spouse dies. Some people have subscriptions in the names of their pets for reasons that Gardner, who described herself as “a non-pet owner,” said she did not understand....
In her letter, Biber contends that
the [Voter Participation] center’s mass mailing may have violated state laws, including those that prohibit falsifying a registration application and
communicating false information to voters about their registration status. “The conduct of the Voter Participation Center likely violates at least one and maybe several Virginia laws aimed at ensuring a fair election,” the letter says. “The Center’s conduct is all the more troubling because the Center’s materials affirmatively tell mailing recipients that ‘records show that you are eligible to vote in the 2012 presidential election.’ ”
Biber also contends that the center violated the law by “pre-populating” the registration forms, meaning it filled in the names on applications. She contends that only voters, not a third party registering them, may fill out the application.
Biber also asks the State Board of Elections to review the eligibility of everyone registered to vote in the past two months.
“This is the only way for voters and other interested parties to regain confidence in the voter registration and electoral process that has been abused by the Voter Participation Center,” she wrote.
State elections officials and Cuccinelli’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment."
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7/13/12, "Nonprofit Voter Participation Center sends election registration docs to dogs, dead people," CBS News, Seattle, Wash.
"Brenda Charlston holds a photo of her long-deceased dog, Rosie, and a voter registration form for "Rosie Charlston" that arrived in the mail for the canine last month, in Seattle, July 11, 2012," ap
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7/25/12, "VA (Virginia) Org Mailing Voter Registration Forms Based on Partisan Firm Catalist's Data," Breitbart, Von Spakovsky
"On July 5, Breitbart News reported on the Justice Department hiring the “explicitly partisan Democratic data company” Catalist to provide data on registered voters in Texas who supposedly lack photo ID to justify its opposition to the state’s voter ID law. Now, the state of Virginia is having problems with a non-profit group, the Voter Participation Center, that has been sending voter registration forms to Virginia residents “addressed to dead relatives, children, family members in other states, non-U.S. citizens, people with similar names, existing registered voters and residents’ cats and dogs.” And who does the non-profit say it got its data from? The same firm used in the Texas case: Catalist."...via Mark Levin show
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