The Pasco County Supervisor of Elections office is flooded with complaints about pre-filled vote-by-mail applications, many of which feature the names of house pets, children and the deceased.
The mailings arrive at people's homes pre-filled, often with the recipient’s full name, date of birth and address already typed onto the form. When the letters feature misspellings or go to someone that is underage, dead or has already voted, this can elicit anger and fear in residents concerned that their information has been compromised, according to Pasco County Supervisor of Elections Brian Corley.
“While it’s amusing to reference that Fluffy the dog got a pre-filled ballot, it’s not funny when a voter whose husband or wife passed away or whose child committed suicide―I have had two of those calls―gets one,” Corley told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay.
The applications hail from two sister nonprofit organizations―the Center for Voter Information and the Voter Participation Center. Both are headquartered in Washington D.C. and were founded in 2003 by Page Gardner.
The goal of these organizations, they say, is to help people register to vote. The two organizations use commercial and public data to identify people who are eligible to vote but who need to register, according to its website.
Gardner told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay there are two mailings: a pre-filled voter registration application and a pre-filled vote-by-mail application. The vote by-mail-application only uses the official Florida voter list since it looks for registered voters, who have yet to cast a ballot. On the other hand, the voter registration application attempts to find people who are of voting age but have not yet registered, which Gardner admits can lead to mistakes because there is no official list of unregistered voters forcing the use of commercial data.
Garder said that Corley is being dishonest by taking a small number of anecdotes to paint her organizations in a bad light.
“We know our error rate and it is very, very small,” Gardner said. “What he [Corley] is trying to do is discredit by metaphor.”
This reporter received one of the mailed applications—with all of his information correct—which is supposed to be completed and mailed to the Pasco Supervisor of Elections via a pre-addressed envelope included in the mailer (see below).
Pasco County Senior Deputy of Voter Services Tami Bentley told CL that there is a noticeably increased workload that can be attributed back to the inadequacies of the applications, which only add to the mound built up by the coronavirus.
Both Corley and Bentley suggested that the commercial data is the probable source of the mailing’s inaccuracies. Corley said that the nonprofit has previously blamed constituents for the names of pets and children appearing on their pre-filled applications mail by citing magazine subscriptions.
Gardner refuted this by reiterating that her organization uses the official Florida voter file—which is a public record under Florida law—to find the names and addresses where the pre-filled vote-by-mail applications are sent. “We use the most current voter file that we can get our hands on,” she said. “If we are sending this to people who are on the official voter file, that they say are in error, then the error began with the voter file.”
Pasco is not the only Florida County to be flooded with complaints about the pre-filled mailings. In a two-page letter dated April 7 to Florida Secretary of State Laurel Lee―which Corley and 34 of Florida’s 67 Supervisors of Elections signed―county representatives ask Lee and Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody to take a firm public stand condemning the nonprofits’ “malign activity.”
“We suspect that you [Lee] are familiar with and are hopefully as distressed as Supervisors about the VPC/CVI scam mailers periodically hectoring Floridians,” the letter read. “Supervisors have addressed this issue individually, but in light of the present circumstance, we fear that this latest round will lead to substantial voter confusion and therefore are asking your assistance.”
The danger of the mailings comes from the ongoing erosion of voter trust, according to Corley.
“It makes me angry; it makes us [Corley and Bentley] angry for the voter because they deserve better,” he said.
Gardner said Coley should welcome the work of her organizations. “We are helping him do what he should be doing, which is making sure more and more people in Pasco County have the opportunity to vote in a healthy and safe way,” she said.
Gardner added that her organizations have generated 300,000 vote-by-mail applications in Florida for the current election cycle alone. Additionally, she said in the last six weeks, their mailers have assisted 10,000 to complete vote-by-mail applications in Pasco County. According to her, the data is collected by tracking barcodes on the pre-addressed envelope included in each application.
In a Friday press release addressing the complaints against the Center for Voting Information, Gardner said Corley should be ashamed of himself for not encouraging all efforts to get Floridians to safely vote by mail during a pandemic while sowing confusion, wasting taxpayer money and scaring the public.
For people who receive mail from these organizations in Pasco County, Bentley recommends that they check to see if their registration is in good standing through Pasco County’s Supervisor of Elections website, which links to the statewide system.
With increased anxiety around large crowds amid surges of coronavirus cases, mail-in-ballots are rising in popularity. As of Monday, more than 3 million vote-by-mail ballots have been requested in Florida and 700,000 completed ballots have been returned, according to a report by the Florida Department of Elections.
Further, misinformation surrounding vote-by-mail ballots continue to occur at the highest levels of government. On Thursday President Donald Trump made the false claim that mail-in-ballots lead to inaccurate elections before suggesting a delay of the upcoming 2020 presidential election.
“With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history,” the tweet read. “It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”
UPDATED: 08/04/20 1:25 p.m. Updated with comments from VD and CVI founder Page Gardner.
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This article appears in Jul 30 – Aug 6, 2020.
