Rock the Vote or Block the Vote

Every single registration submitted through the Rock the Vote website in New York City produced an incorrect registration because the Rock the Vote organization provided the wrong address information on the registration forms. This isn't a case of fraud, but a screwup by Rock the Vote. 100,000 registrations were affected.

Instead of sending the registration forms to the county board of elections (in New York City - the borough board of elections), the forms were all sent to the State Board of Elections. New York requires that registrations go to the county board of elections in the county in which the registrant resides.

It turns out that every registration application generated by Rock the Vote in New York State is printed with the wrong address — about 100,000 forms this year. Although voters in New York must register with the boards of elections in their home counties — in the city, they’re called boroughs — all the Rock the Vote applications were addressed to the New York State Board of Elections, which does not handle voter registrations.

“They backed the post office truck to the building here, twice,” said Robert Brehm, with the state board in Albany. “We had 32 bushels of mail one day. We had every person in the building working on it.”

The state workers opened the mail and shipped it to the proper counties. Although city officials said they would try to register everyone who had mailed an application by the Oct. 10 deadline, no one could say how many of these would make it on the books in time for Election Day, given the rickety condition of New York’s voting operations.

People in a few other states have also reported registration problems.

“That’s not on Rock the Vote,” Stephanie Young, a spokeswoman for the group, said on Friday. “Once they register with Rock the Vote, they print it out and send it on themselves. We’re out of it after that. Then it’s on the State Board of Elections.”

Normally, Rock the Vote is not quite that modest, having declared itself the “premier organization representing the intersection of young people, politics and popular culture.”

One way to reduce the likelihood of fraud and other elections registration related issues would be to eliminate the use of third party groups like ACORN or Rock the Vote to conduct registration drives and instead have a single nonpartisan or government body such as the already in place state board of elections carry out the efforts, just as the DMV handles vehicle registrations.

It would not only streamline the registration process, but it would enable states and localities to cross check registrations to ensure that only those who are eligible to vote are able to register. It would further eliminate the last minute deluge of registrations that are part and parcel of the ACORN registration drives that include hundreds of thousands of bogus registrations.