Florida officials fume over mailers from Center for Voter Information
The Center for Voter Information says it is seeking to encourage participation in the process. A spokesman for the Broward elections supervisor said its mailers are ‘deceptive, confusing, wrong, and ... create distrust.’
A “get-out-the-vote” nonprofit is deluging Floridians with voter registration forms and mail-in ballot requests that, while legitimate, are being criticized by election officials as confusing and may sometimes contain inaccurate information.
One reader received a voter registration form that included his wrong middle initial and an incorrect past address. Another mail-in ballot request was sent to someone who had already requested one from a local election supervisor.
Steve Vancore, a spokesman for the Broward County Supervisor of Elections, said the mailers are “deceptive, confusing, wrong, and ... create distrust.”
The group, the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Voter Information, says its efforts are crucial during a pandemic when traditional methods of registering to vote and going to the polls don’t feel safe. It says it has helped hundreds of thousands of Floridians register and request mailin ballots.
While experts caution that mistakes in voterturnout mailers are common, some local officials are angry. They say voters should simply use the state’s election office website to register and request mail-in ballots online from their county election supervisor. And they urge those who have already registered to make sure their information is accurate. (Miami-Dade County residents can check their info here. Broward County residents can go here.)
The mailers from the left-leaning Center for Voter Information provide voters with registration forms or mail-in ballot requests and ask them to send the documents to their local election offices using a pre-addressed return envelope. They list a P.O. box in Tallahassee as their point of origin — potentially misleading voters into thinking the group is a state agency, critics say.
“This 3rd party group has been the bane of our existence,” Vancore of the Broward elections office said in an email. “They are sloppy, use bad data, refuse to disclose their purpose, work with us or follow basic protocols, and we handle literally dozens of calls every day from confused and angry voters whose dogs, deceased spouses, and randomly named people are being asked to do a number of things from registering to requesting a [vote-by-mail] ballot. We have publicly and vigorously opposed the deceptive practices of this particular group.”
(Broward Supervisor Peter Antonacci was appointed by former Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, in 2018 after Scott suspended Democrat Brenda Snipes from office.)
If a voter were to send in a registration form from the Center for Voter Information containing inaccurate identifying information, the local supervisor would have to contact the voter to correct the information — possibly threatening the ability of that person to vote if the mistakes are not fixed.
The nonprofit’s activities
could also be used to gin up mistrust in November’s election as President Donald Trump attacks — without evidence — the integrity of the U.S. voting system, particularly the use of mail-in ballots.
But filled out correctly, the forms from the Center for Voter Information will allow voters to register or request mail-in ballots.
“These mail campaigns are legal, but they are not produced by the Elections Department,” said Suzy Trutie, a deputy supervisor at the Miami-Dade County Elections Department.
Tom Lopach, president and CEO of the Center for Voter Information and its partner organization, the Voting Participation Center, said that since the United States has no system of automatic voter registration, it is up to third-party groups like his to register voters. Since 2004, he said, the groups have helped register more than 753,000 Floridians.
So far this cycle, the groups have sent nearly 8.9 million mailers — sometimes multiple pieces to a single person — targeting people they’ve identified as unregistered Florida voters. More than 201,000 have registered, Lopach said. The nonprofits are notified when the post office scans the return envelope. They have also sent nearly 8.5 million vote-by-mail applications in Florida, with roughly 609,000 people requesting ballots. (The state has nearly 14 million registered voters.)
Lopach added that Florida has lower rates of voter registration than the national average, including among demographics his organizations focus on like people of color, unmarried women and millennials.
“What we know for certain is that there is work to do to mobilize and register voters in Florida,” he said. “We are happy to be doing that work.”
He also said that all mailings are clearly marked as coming from a nonprofit, not the state, and added that his group had asked for a meeting in late 2019 with Antonacci, the Broward supervisor, who declined.
“The ‘Voter Participation Center’ has caused voter distress and confusion [particularly amongst Seniors] in this county and throughout Florida,” Antonacci wrote in an email provided to the Miami Herald by the nonprofit. “Accordingly, I decline your invitation to meet and potentially legitimize your destabilizing undertakings in our state.”
The Center for Voting Information has financial muscle behind it, raising $19 million in 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, according to federal tax filings. And it and its partner organization plan to continue their mailing campaigns, with another 5.2 million voter registration forms and 3.8 million vote-by-mail applications heading to Floridians this month.
“We’re living in a moment where there are two camps: Those who are helping Americans register to vote and those who are trying to keep Americans from registering and voting,” said Lopach, former chief of staff to Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, a Democrat who is now running for the Senate. “We are squarely in the camp of helping Americans vote.”
The pandemic means that efforts to get out the vote through direct mail and the Internet are more crucial than ever. The number of Floridians registering at the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles has fallen 23% compared to 2016, according to state figures.
Michael McDonald, an associate professor of political science at the University of Florida who studies U.S. elections, said mistakes by third-party groups like the Center for Voter Information do happen. Campaigns can make similar errors in their getout-the-vote campaigns because their efforts often draw on imperfect information from state voter files and commercial databases.
“If you get large databases, you’re going to find mistakes in them,” McDonald said. “There’s nothing fraudulent going on here. But people get upset and they think there must be some sort of fraud in the system.”
Pets can end up receiving voter turnout mail because they are sometimes listed in commercial databases, for instance for magazine subscriptions.
But “you can’t sign Fluffy up to vote,” McDonald said.
“When you’re dealing with commercial data,” Lopach explained, “inevitably there will be a mistake along the way but we endeavor to be as accurate as possible.”
Even the state can err. In a telephone survey of more than 400 Florida registered voters, 17 percent said the state’s official voter file contained at least one piece of incorrect identifying information about them, such as their name, address, birth date, sex or race. (The research was conducted by McDonald and other Florida political scientists.)
“When you’re working with large data sets, you can have these small problems and when you magnify them out of proportion it can look like they can affect the integrity of the election,” McDonald said. “But they can’t.”
He cautioned that the president could use such mistakes to falsely undermine the credibility of the election and insinuate that “somehow the election is being stolen from him.” A HISTORY OF ‘SCREW-UPS’ The Center for Voter Information describes itself as a nonpartisan nonprofit that has helped more than five million Americans register to vote and get to the polls.
It is run by former Democratic strategists and political operatives. In the 2018 election cycle, the group received nearly $2.8 million in expenditures from NextGen Climate Action, a super PAC founded by billionaire and former Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. It also received $2.5 million from the League of Conservation Voters, an environmental advocacy group.
Founder Page Gardner drew combined annual compensation of more than $220,000 from the Center for Voter Information and the Voter Participation Center in 2018, according to federal tax filings.
The nonprofit has drawn criticism both locally and nationally for high-profile mistakes in past mailers.
Earlier this year, the Center for Voter Information sent forms to 2.3 million Floridians urging them to vote by mail. But more than 311,000 ballot request forms did not include a date or a clearly marked line for voters to sign their names, violating state law, according to the Tallahassee Democrat.
“What I would most like to see you do would be to just stop any more contact with our voters and go away,” Leon County Supervisor of Elections Mark Earley, a Democrat, wrote to a lawyer for the group. “We will handle the fallout from your latest screw-up, as we do multiple times each year, it seems.”
(Lopach, the group’s CEO, blamed a printing error and said the mailer included instructions telling voters where to sign.)
And in Virginia, the center sent hundreds of thousands of absentee ballot applications with return envelopes addressed to the wrong election office, leading recipients to worry they were the target of a voter suppression campaign, according to The Washington Post.
“Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it, but it could have been sent by the other party,” Hank Wolf, an 86-year-old who plans to vote for Joe Biden, told the Post. “It could have been sent by Trump.”