NY Times Gets it Very, Very Wrong

Today’s New York Times article was dead wrong.

You may have seen the article today accusing Rock the Vote of giving New Yorkers the wrong address to mail voter registration forms. This is not true – don’t let this sloppy journalism scare you. See our press statement correcting the story here.

Rock the Vote’s online registration form, when printed, gives New Yorkers the address for the New York State Board of Elections. According to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, this is the correct address.

But because we always confirm information like this, we also checked with the New York State Board of Elections. Twice in writing the Board of Elections confirmed that Rock the Vote gives registrants the correct mailing address. See the emails here. And today, the EAC again confirmed that our system is “current and correct.”

However, this doesn’t make the problem go away – it’s just a different problem. It appears that the New York State Board of Elections is not processing some voter registration forms. Rumor has it there’s a 35-40,000 application backlog in New York state.

The Times did uncover a story, it just got the story wrong.

We’re taking action on this immediately. We’re correcting the story, but more importantly we’re working with attorneys, impacted young people, election experts, and the Board of Elections to make sure every single eligible person who mailed a registration application to the NYS Board of Elections is properly registered and able to vote on Tuesday November 4th.

Record numbers of people are registering to vote this year. That is an incredibly wonderful thing for our democracy. Politicians should be praising this, but instead they seem to be shirking responsibility. Sadly, this appears to be yet another example of our broken election administration system.

Together we can fix this. Together we can call out the real culprits. Together we can make sure every eligible voter is able to cast a ballot on Election Day.

And together we can take action to make sure problems like these don’t happen in the future.

If you downloaded and mailed in a registration form from New York, check your registration status TODAY and report problems to vote@rockthevote.com. Please spread the word.

And remember – anyone in any state can find out how to check their registration at www.CanIVote.org. Encourage everyone you know to do so and to report any problems to us or by calling 1-866-OUR-VOTE.

Stay tuned – we’ll be in touch in the next 48 hours with additional actions we’ll be taking.

For more information, see our press statement here.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 25th, 2008 at 6:27 pm and is filed under voting rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.