Letter to Editor: Voter Participation Center Helps Eligible Americans Register to Vote
Founder Page Gardner responds to a recent Letter to the Editor a Jackson Township wrote of attempts by the organization to register her 16-year-old daughter to vote, despite her not being old enough to do so.
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In a recent Letter to the Editor, a Jackson Township resident reported that our organization, the Voter Participation Center, erroneously sent a voter-registration application to her 16-year-old daughter. We are not familiar with this incident but, if true, we regret the mistake.
The Voter Participation Center is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that is only interested in helping eligible Americans to register to vote. In fact, since 2004 we have helped register 1.6 million Americans—enabling them to participate in our great democracy.
No state election officials in Pennsylvania or elsewhere publish lists of unregistered voters, and so we work with commercial vendors to build our own lists. We go to great lengths to ensure that these lists are accurate, but no list is perfect.
That’s why all our forms carefully explain in multiple locations that only eligible voters should apply. We specify who is–and is not–eligible to register to vote. And our forms provide both a website address and a smartphone scanning code to help mail recipients instantly check their registration status.
The Jackson Township resident also complained that the phone number on our website is not working. The number is active and working, and we encourage her to call us again so we can remove her from our mailing list.
More than three million people in Pennsylvania are eligible but not registered to vote, according to U.S. Census data. We hope all eligible Pennsylvanians will exercise their right to vote during this important election season.
Page Gardner
Founder & President
Voter Participation Center
Thoughts on voter registration? What about the Voter ID Law?
Tell us in the comments.
Donna Robinson
1:41 pm on Saturday, September 8, 2012
This letter is in response to Ms. Page Gardners response to my letter explaining my experience with her group, the Voter Participation Center. To clarify to Ms. Gardner, my 16 year old daughter received two attempts to register her by mail, not one. To further clarify, she does not even have a drivers license, a credit card, or any magazine subscriptions from which they could have pulled her name. The truth telling Tribune Review is investigating the story now, and hopefully will get to the bottom of the source of how exactly they got my childs name and address to send these two mailings to her. The group is obviously spending considerable money to send these mailings out, they should probably try a little harder to make sure they are getting to Eligible voters if this is their true objective. My point in writing the letter was and has been, Thank goodness for the Voter ID laws legislators have been working to pass, I don't think Ms. Gardner can be sure of how many ineligible registrations have been mailed out, returned or could possibly yield votes that could taint the elections further in our great Republic. Maybe the registration of potential voters should be left up to the Bureau of Elections, the individual parties , and individual citizens leaving Ms. Gardners efforts and funds to be used in a more productive way