Q: Why did we mail a voter registration form to Ms. Nudelman’s pet fish Princess.

A: “Nudelman says Princess might be on that list because the family once filled in the goldfish’s name when they got a second phone line for a computer.”

Dead goldfish offered the vote in Illinois, Associated Press, October 21, 2008

Fast Facts on Our Mail Voter Registration Efforts

• If your pet has received a voter registration application from us, it’s because your pets name is on a voting age population list of commercial data.
• Creating a list of unregistered individuals in an imperfect process. There are two steps in this process. First, we acquire a “voting age population” containing the names and address of most of the people in a state. Then we match that list against the state voter list to identify names of people who appear to be unregistered.
• There are a number of voting age population lists that are compiled by companies that create and sell mailing lists, primarily for use in commercial direct marketing. These voting age population lists are fairly comprehensive, comprising about 180 million households nationwide. They are compiled from an array of government and commercial sources.
• Some addresses or name listings on commercial lists contain errors or refer to people who no longer live at the listed address. Some of the people listed are recently deceased. These lists can contain a small percentage of listings that refer to no real person at all but fictitious names used to order products or services in the mail.
• Once we have a list of households in a state, then we match that list against a list of registered voters provided by state or local governments. Persons on the household lists who do not match with a name and address on the voter list are considered unregistered.
• The voter registration applications we send have the return address of the appropriate election official, so recipients send the applications directly to their state registration official.
• WVWV tracks data on applications that are returned to the recipients state registration official.
• We rematch each list against the voter list EVERY time it mails. Once we have a voting age population list and a voter list, WVWV matches those lists together.

Women’s Voices. Women Vote has created the Voter Participation Center to help WVWV register and motivate unmarried women, and other under-represented groups, to participate in the democratic process. WVWV and the Voter Participation Center are working to give a voice to the 20 million single women who did not vote in the 2004 election. Unmarried women are the fastest growing, large demographic in our country, yet they fail to register and vote at same rate as their married sisters.

WVWV and the Voter Participation Center have teamed up to encourage unmarried women and other under-represented groups to take an active role in their country, by registering to vote, voting and making their voices heard in the policy process. The Voter Participation Center is reaching out to underrepresented groups by making registering and participating as easy as possible. VPC mailings include important voting information and useful resources, such as an actual voter registration form.

The Voter Participation Center is a project of Women’s Voices. Women Vote. The Voter Participation Center works to study ways to encourage voting and to increase participation in the electorate. The Voter Participation Center is a non-partisan, non-profit organization that does not support any candidate.