Mailed voter forms are part of unofficial effort to expand election participation

The following letter from Walker County Elections and Registration’s Danielle L. Montgomery concerns what appear to be voter registration forms that are being received by some county residents.

You may have recently received what appears to be a partially completed voter registration form in the mail. This form was not mailed from Walker County or the Secretary of State’s office. We do not mail out partially completed voter registration applications. You received this form from the non-profit Voter Participation Center (VPC). It is an organization with the stated goal of increasing voter participation.

“Failing to return this form does not mean you will be removed from the list of voters. If you are concerned about their use of your voter information or registration status, you can verify your voting record using the Secretary of State office’s “My Voter Page” (MVP) for registered Georgia voters. If you are interested in completing the form that you received, you can submit it to The Georgia Secretary of State’s Office, and they will promptly and securely forward the application to your county registrar.

“If you would like to know more about how your information was obtained and why you were contacted, or if you are concerned about inaccurate information, you should contact the Voter Participation Center directly. You can visit their website at www.voterparticipation.org. Their contact information is below: The Voter Participation Center Phone: 202-659-9570 Fax: 202-659-9585 Email: info@voterparticipation.org https://www.mvp.sos.ga.gov/MVP/mvp.do

For more than a decade, the Voter Participation Center, a non-profit headquartered in Washginton, D.C, has actively worked to increase voter participation. This is particularly true for what the VPC considers as the Rising American Electorate—unmarried women, people of color, and millennials— who are now the majority of eligible voters.

The group has been faulted for having mailed forms to individual’s pets and to the dead. That does not seem to be something done by design, but happens because VPC uses publicly available data to generate mailing lists.

The Secretary of State office wants individuals to understand these mailings are not some sort of scam, and again advise anyone who wants to register or wonders about their voting status to contact either the state or their county registration office.