Registration Inundation

A glut of voter registrations in Philadelphia for the upcoming election is creating a backlog in which citizens aren't getting their registration cards in a timely manner. Officials say grassroots get-out-the-vote groups are to blame.

For Bob Lee, the city's voter registrar, this is the biggest wave he's seen for a general election in quite some time. It's matched only by the 1983 primary when Frank Rizzo jumped to the Republican party.

As of mid-September, Lee's office had received more than 190,000 registrations—some 38 percent of the half-million votes cast in Philly in the last presidential election. But Lee says his office is getting angry calls from wannabe voters, because they're not getting their cards in the mail. After a month, some believe their cards have been lost. Many will then reregister, creating still a bigger backlog.

The delay, says Lee, is not his office's fault. The problem is that several grass-roots groups are hanging onto their registrations. "A lot of large organizations out there, for some unknown reason are photocopying, scanning or entering voters names into databases," Lee says.

It's not unlawful for groups to be collecting names, says Fred Voigt, of the Committee of 70 election-watchdog organization. "But holding back registrations is disruptive," he adds.

Both Voigt and Lee single out the national community-service organization ACORN as a perennial problem.

Wes Lathrop, who runs ACORN's registration drive in Pennsylvania, admits that his organization wasn't prepared to deal with the success they've had in Philadelphia. ACORN blew through their initial goal of 42,000 registrations in Philadelphia, topping 60,000 by the middle of this month.

Because the organization double-checks its registrations for fraud before sending them in, Lathrop says ACORN couldn't keep up.

Many of ACORN's registration collectors are paid workers—some are ex-convicts and recovering drug addicts. Vito Canuso, chairman of the Republican City Committee, is scornful of registration efforts that pay their workers. Republican registration collectors, says Canuso, are volunteers.

(While Canuso declined to say how many collectors Republicans have or how many registrations were sent in, Lee estimates that some 15,000 of the 190,000 recent registrations are Republican.)

"Paid mercenaries," says Canuso of some of those involved in ACORN's efforts. Lathrop laughs at Canuso's phrase.

"Yes, we have paid collectors—and convicts," he says. "And they've done very well."

But how well is tough to tell.

There are 1,022,999 voters on Philadelphia's rolls, says Lee. But it's anyone's guess as to how many are unduplicated and undead.

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