Virginia voter registration statistics indicate high youth turnout
By Rachael Dickson, Youth Vote '08 correspondent
Editor's Note: This is part of a series on registering young voters. Read more.
Based on recently released voter registration statistics, Virginia could vote for a Democratic presidential candidate this year for the first time since 1964.
Nancy Rodrigues, Secretary of the State Board of Elections, said last week that more than 306,000 people have registered in Virginia this year through Sept. 30, with thousands of applications still needing to be counted. Of that number, 42 percent of those newly registered are younger than 25; a number that can be partly attributed to the massive voter registration drives that descended on college campuses across the state over the past few months.
Community Voters Project, a non-partisan group working to register African-Americans and Hispanics, announced Oct. 6 that it has registered at least 82,000 minority voters in Virginia. If correct, these statistics indicate that at least 20 percent of the new registrants are minorities.
Both presidential campaigns have reflected the importance of Virginia as a battleground state in the election by visiting multiple times in the past few months.
Rachael Dickson is a junior at George Mason University and an award-winning journalist who works as a freelance contributor for WashingtonPost.com's LoudounExtra.com.
I actually worked for Community Voter Project in the Virginia Beach office. I was literally fired because I would not comply with direct orders to alter the Voter Registration Applications in such a way as to indicate (exactly three weeks prior to the deadline to register) which applicants were minorities.
Interestingly, it takes an average of thirty (30) days to receive a person's voter registration card. Why would the CVP want it's workers to begin making "a little, tiny dot on the bottom right portion of the application of all applicants that are minorities"?
I contacted the Registrar's office and was instructed to contact the State Election Board's office. I got a message to one of the officials there and was instructed to contact the Commonwealth Attorney's office - which I did immediately. The next day, I went in to speak with a Legal Investigator and gave the details of all that I had seen, heard (this group does not act non-partisan nor seem non-partisan given the rampant anti-McClain/Palin comments I heard daily), and been asked to do.
I have heard nothing since.
Nobody seems interested in this story for some reason.
This is outrageous. How many of the applications that did NOT have the "little, tiny dot" actually made it to the registration office, I wonder?
One can never be sure...
When I started asking questions, I was accused of being racist, Republican, and "insensitive to low-income, minorities," and told if I did not comply I needed to leave, that I was fired. Incidentally, while this "conference" was taking place, papers were being disposed of in a cardboard box then taped and labeled to be shipped somewhere.
Would somebody PLEASE look into this?!