Posted Date: June 25, 2008
Missing Voter Project Working To Register Area’s Eligible Voters
By Leonard E. Colvin
Chief Reporter
New Journal & Guide
Until the deadline, the two political parties will be spending hundreds of hours seeking, signing up and motivating newly registered and seasoned voters to go to the polls.
While the political parties will be investing money and manpower to undertake this project, hundreds of non-profit and non-partisan organizations are on the job, too. They are recruiting and fielding people to locate, identify, and motivate voters who may go “missing” from official voting rolls.
The Virginia Organizing Project has signed up the Democracy South organization to run its “Missing Voter Project”, throughout the region. Missing Voter Project operatives will coordinate with other non-profit organizations, such as the NAACP and the Women’s League, to locate and help sign up people who are not registered to vote and perhaps have no intention of participating in the political process this fall.
Two the Missing Voter Project’s coordinators, during a recent interview with the New Journal and Guide, said their campaign is underway as small bands of canvassers have been dispatched to neighborhoods where large numbers of non-registered voters are believed to be living in Hampton Roads.
The activist Winnette Hagans and technocrat Anthony Fairfax are two of the coordinators of the Virginia Organizing Project’s “Missing Voter” operation in Hampton Roads.
They are long time warriors in the fine art of steering citizens to participate in the political process, especially at the polls.
They both have worked with NSU’s Voting Rights Project. Hagans and Fairfax crunched census numerical data to help draw boundary lines during past redistricting of federal and state voting districts.
The men are part of a new four-week-old, small budget and mostly volunteer-driven operation to recruit volunteers to help find and register 249,000 missing voters currently living in Hampton Roads.
If a good portion of the un-registered are signed up, they could make a difference in this year’s general election.
According to statistics compiled by the Hampton Roads’ Missing Voter Project, there are some 1,106,848 people who are members of the region’s Voting Age Population (VAP) and are eligible to vote.
There are some 784,174 who are officially registered to vote.
Hagans said Virginia Beach (67,113), Chesapeake (42,808), and Norfolk (39,373) have the top three numbers of Missing Voters that the campaign is looking to sign up to vote this fall.
There are some 97,959 African Americans who are part of the Missing Voter community and the highest number, 18,365, are located in various majority Black neighborhoods of Norfolk. Virginia Beach has over 17,000.
As part of its voter mobilization efforts, the Obama campaign has launched an effort to find these persons in states the Democrats lost by slim margins during the last presidential election. For instance, a half million Black voters specifically, who were eligible to vote in Florida did not vote and the Democrats are going after them during the next four months.
The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies predicts that turnout could rise by as much as 20% nationally among Black voters, and some Democratic strategists feel they can spur Black turnout in the battleground states to as high as 75% of registered voters.
Another key target are voters of all races under 35, including college students and even high-schoolers who will be 18 by election day. In Virginia, for example, nearly 90,000 people 34 or younger have registered in recent months—and the Obama campaign is targeting many more who have not registered. Florida strategists have identified about 600,000 young Democrats with "little to no voting history," according to an internal memo. The campaign is applying the same effort to reach unaffiliated Latinos in New Mexico and Nevada.
Hagans said the Missing Voter Project would prefer to recruit workers who live in the communities as opposed to bringing in folks from outside of them. He said that most of the leaders and trainers of the registration and canvassing teams who will be invading these areas will be operatives of the Virginia Organizing Project.
Fairfax said the effort is non-partisan. Individuals who are out canvassing neighborhoods or signing up new voters in front of local supermarkets or along the sidewalks of Hampton Roads can be fired if they are caught expressing their personal political views or supporting a particular politician who is running for office this fall.
Democracy South, Fairfax said, has devised computer technology based on a list of consumer and demographic information from various data bases using census tracts and zip codes looking at every neighborhood of the seven cities of Hampton Roads. The data will pinpoint each home where a non-registered person may exist.
For more information about the Missing Voter Project or to volunteer call 757 619-6069 or the www.Missingvoterproject.com.
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