I was director of Project Vote's Little Rock office for part of the 2004 election. We registered over 20,000 African-American and Latino voters in Arkansas in about six months. That's far less than the number of people Obama's Project Vote campaign registered in Illinois during the 1992 election, but I'm proud of what the Arkansas team accomplished. After several months of work I heard that another group began a registration drive targeted at African-Americans and they quickly decided to target the rural areas because everyone they approached in Little Rock had already been registered by Project Vote.
I've been curious to see how the media and Republican attack dogs would deal with Obama's organizing background. Michelle Malkin did a hit piece about Project Vote and ACORN that has been the template for the angry talk radio crowd.
Malkin referenced the prosecution of two ACORN employees for submitting false registrations as evidence that the organization engages in voter fraud. What she didn't mention is that ACORN turned over the two employees and requested prosecution after they caught the employees submitting fake registrations. I guess Malkin appeals to people who believe anything they read as long as it slanders a Democrat.
Any time you pay people to register voters you run the risk of someone faking forms. My office didn't pay on a per-registration basis, but we did require people to be fairly consistent about how many registrations they brought in on a work day. Otherwise you're paying people to do nothing. Some people may not like the idea of paying people to register voters but Project Vote's approach is very effective at registering voters who aren't reached by local governments or volunteer efforts. Most County Clerks are pretty passive about their voter registration efforts, if they do anything at all.
We warned workers about the consequences of submitting false registrations often enough that most people didn't try. But, I did have to fire one person for falsifying forms. I figured out that he had gotten a list of phone numbers and addresses of people he worked with at another job and filled out the forms without their knowledge. He didn't react too well when I fired him but that's another story.
Getting thousands of new African-Americans registered to vote attracts negative attention from conservative groups and politicians who don't like the idea of too many black people voting. That's why they're so quick to make accusations against Project Vote and ACORN.
When I worked for Project Vote we had a three part process for catching false registrations and every form was examined before it was submitted to an election authority. A large part of my job was spending around two hours each night with others verifying forms that had been collected by our crews.
I don't believe Project Vote could have been any more vigilant about ensuring that forms were legitimate and accurately filled out. In fact, by helping people fill out the long form completely and correctly, our standards prevented voters from having their registration disqualified. The Arkansas form can seem long and confusing to someone looking at it for the first time so all of our workers were trained how to make sure each part was filled out correctly in compliance with the law.
(The Clinton Presidential Library was under construction while I lived in Little Rock and opened soon after the election.)
Running a voter registration drive that targeted people of color in an old Jim Crow state was an interesting experience. We got support from many people in the community and the Secretary of State was very helpful. But we also got some opposition. An employee asked permission to register voters outside a store in a small town and was told by the owner that he didn't want "those kind of people getting registered to vote." Those people were his black customers.
In the middle of the drive the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (which has a conservative slant, despite the name) ran an editorial by a regular contributor suggesting that not everyone needs to be registered to vote. He thought there should be a test to see if people are informed enough, perhaps with some questions about the Constitution. No, I'm not kidding. In the middle of a campaign to register African-American and Hispanic voters, the largest paper in Arkansas ran an editorial calling for a Constitutional literacy test as a requirement for voting. The Civil Rights struggle isn't something to read about in history books. It's still happening today.
Like most Southern states, Arkansas voter registration laws must be approved by the federal Justice Department. That makes it much easier to run a registration drive in Arkansas than in Illinois. Illinois laws have improved modestly in the last few years but we still have ridiculous restrictions that make large scale registration drives difficult.
For example, in order for a person to register voters as a deputy registrar they must be sponsored for a training session by an established political party, campaign or other political organization, and they're still only allowed to register voters in that one county. I may be able to register voters in Springfield but I still wouldn't be able to register voters in Chicago. The alternative to that system is using motor voter forms, which the Illinois Board of Elections shamefully fought against for years and many County Clerks still discourage people from using them.
In Arkansas, I was able to get as many free voter registration forms as I needed from the Secretary of State. When I approached the Illinois Board of Elections for voter registration forms in 2004 an employee told me, "I might get in trouble for giving you these." After talking to several people someone finally agreed to give me about 30 forms, twelve of which were in Mandarin Chinese.
The boogie man of fraudulent registrations keeps thousands of people disenfranchised in every election. There are no modern cases of people being prosecuted for voting multiple times with false registrations in Illinois but in every election I see people denied their right to vote because we have needless restrictions and no election-day registration.
The Illinois system is designed to keep established political powers in charge of who votes, and that's one reason why Obama's wildly successful 1992 drive was so impressive and politically significant. It shows that he has excellent management skills and the dedication to work long hours at a difficult job that empowers people in their own communities. Obama has every reason to be proud of his work for Project Vote.