Registration drive aims at less-frequent voters

The Voter Participation Center and its partner group, the Center for Voter Information, are mailing 390,237 voter registration applications to people in Nevada this month as part of their largest-ever campaign to register voters.

More than 789,500 people who can vote in Nevada are not yet registered, according to the “Voting and Registration in the Election of November 2018” supplement to the U.S. Census, and 74% of them are young people, people of color and unmarried women. People in these groups often move between elections and register and vote at lower rates than the rest of the population.

As states implement stay-at-home or shelter-in-place orders and millions of Americans self-isolate because of the coronavirus pandemic, mail-based voter registration efforts have never been more important. VPC and CVI run the nation’s largest mail-based voter registration program, and their work is crucial today.

VPC and CVI are significantly increasing their efforts during the coronavirus crisis to ensure that historically disadvantaged communities can exercise their democracy by registering to vote by mail and requesting vote-by-mail ballots online.

“With COVID-19 impacting elections, we cannot take any citizen for granted and must do all we can to increase turnout in this uncertain time. The future of our democracy is at stake,” said Page Gardner, the groups’ founder and board chair. “We have a major opportunity to close the gap on voter registration and make sure the electorate is as representative as the country as a whole. That’s why it’s critical for prospective voters to register and make sure their registrations are up to date.”

The VPC mails registration applications to unregistered individuals along with pre-addressed envelopes to make it easy to send completed forms directly to local election officials.

People who want to register online, have questions about the mailing or who want to be excluded from future mailings can visit voterparticipation.org.

Since 2004, the organizations have helped register more than 4.6 million voters nationally, including more than 69,961 people who applied to register in Nevada. This month, VPC and CVI will be sending nearly 12 million pieces of mail to prospective voters in 22 states.