A Democratic-leaning group working to get more unmarried women, people of color and millennials to the polls in November has sewn confusion in Virginia through mailers to voters that imply they’re not registered, election officials said Thursday. The Washington-based Voter Participation Center, a nonprofit that operates in 23 states, mailed 140,000 voter registration forms in Virginia with a message telling recipients they “do not appear to be currently registered to vote.” The same group sent the same kind of confusing mailers in Virginia in the weeks before the 2016 presidential election.
The mailers, which asked recipients if they are “Fed up with Washington?”, were part of a national push to get what the group sees as “the rising American electorate” to cast ballots in the mid-term elections. Mailers were sent to a total of about 2.3 million homes, the group said.
In Virginia, the mailers prompted confused voters to contact state and local election officials with worries that they’d either been knocked off of voter rolls or that their personal information had been compromised — tapping into concerns over fraud in what is already a tense election season, officials said.