I wonder what the precise impacts of partisan and non-partisan voter registration and turnout drives, financed by millions of dollars, will be in Ohio and other battleground states. What proportions of newly registered voters will go out to the polls and vote the ways that those who financed their registration want them to respectively?
<blockquote> The analysis by The New York Times of county-by-county data shows that in Democratic areas of Ohio -- primarily low-income and minority neighborhoods -- new registrations since January have risen 250 percent over the same period in 2000. In comparison, new registrations have increased just 25 percent in Republican areas. A similar pattern is apparent in Florida: in the strongest Democratic areas, the pace of new registration is 60 percent higher than in 2000, while it has risen just 12 percent in the heaviest Republican areas.
While comparable data could not be obtained for other swing states, similar registration drives have been mounted in them as well, and party officials on both sides say record numbers of new voters are being registered nationwide. This largely hidden but deadly earnest battle is widely believed by campaign professionals and political scientists to be potentially decisive in the presidential election. . . .
The precise impact of the swell in registration is difficult to predict, as there is no reliable gauge of how many of these new voters will actually vote. Some experts, though, say that the spike has not been accurately captured by political polls and could confound prognostications in closely contested states.
What is clear is that each side has deployed huge numbers of workers and devoted millions of dollars to the effort. Much of it is being directed by civil rights and community groups, as well as soft-money organizations allied with the Democrats. One such Democratic umbrella group, America Votes, says its constituents -- labor unions, trial lawyers, environmental groups, community organizations -- will spend $300 million on registration and turnout in swing states, a sum that dwarfs the $150 million in public financing the two candidates together will receive for the entire fall campaign.
The registration drives are just the first step in a campaign by each side to get more Americans to vote by using personal contact. As registration winds down, with early October cutoffs in many states, efforts will shift to staying in touch through Election Day with repeated phone calls and visits, and, on Nov. 2, ferrying people to the polls.
In Ohio -- no Republican presidential candidate has ever been elected without carrying the state - the campaign has been especially exhaustive. Canvassers ride public transportation, visit coin laundries, and trudge the sidewalks and parking lots at the job centers, housing agencies and community colleges.
In Columbus, Akume Green has haunted the Franklin County Courthouse for months, working the sidewalk between the entrance and the nearby bus stop. Ms. Green says she has signed up more than 700 voters since March here and elsewhere in the city. But it is getting harder to do so, she said. On a recent day, the first 12 people she asked said they had already registered.
"I get about 30 new voters or changes of address in six hours," said Ms. Green, who was hired by Project Vote, the nonpartisan arm of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or Acorn. "I used to get 16 in 45 minutes, but now everyone's registered."
Studies have shown that calling voters and showing up at their houses before and on Election Day substantially increases turnout -- and is cheaper per vote than buying a television advertisement. Republicans used the strategy with great success in the 2002 elections.
But Donald P. Green, a professor of political science at Yale who has conducted many of those studies, said there was no reliable way to tell how many new voters would turn out at the polls, especially those from lower-income areas.
"Do you get 30 percent, or do you get 70 percent?" Professor Green said. "To the extent that these new voters are on the radar screen of groups that have the kind of resources these groups have at their disposal, they might well turn out."
Steve Rosenthal, the chief executive of Americans Coming Together, or ACT, a soft-money group that is trying to register Democrats, said he believed they would. "I think what's happening on the streets, below the radar, is what's going to make the big difference on Election Day," said Mr. Rosenthal, who said his organization and the other groups would register two and a half million new Democratic voters nationwide.
But Republican officials say they remain confident that their voters will prove easier to get to the polls. "It would scare me if we weren't doing our own thing," said Joanne Davidson, the regional chairwoman of the Bush campaign in four Midwestern states including Ohio, of the wave of new Democrats. "We know how to turn out voters."
Ms. Green is typical of the army of registrars who have been working the streets here, some of them since last September. Their persistence has produced results. Franklin County had 650,000 registered voters in the 2000 election. "Now we're over 800,000," said Matt Damschroder, the director of the Board of Elections. "If you look at the pure census numbers, you'd think we are close to registering the entire voting-age population."
Project Vote says it has registered 147,000 new voters in Ohio. Americans Coming Together said that, together with allied groups that are part of America Votes, it had registered 300,000 new voters. America Votes and ACT are openly Democratic, although they cannot legally coordinate with the party or the Kerry campaign.
Republican officials say they think the paid workers who are registering low-income voters are sloppy, and are skeptical of the number of voters they claim to have registered, saying many are duplicates and changes of address. Mr. Damschroder said he had to throw out many of the cards he got because the voters were already registered. "One woman had signed a card three different times," with three different groups, he said.
Prosecutors in Columbus have filed criminal charges against an Acorn registrar, saying that he filed a false registration form and forged a signature. Officials for the group say they fired the worker and instituted a quality checking system before the prosecutors acted.
Nevertheless, an examination of county registration records shows that the groups have added thousands of new Democrats to the rolls and have far outnumbered new registrations in Republican areas. In a 300-square-block area east of the courthouse in downtown Columbus that voted nine to one against Mr. Bush in 2000, for instance, 3,000 new voters have registered this year. That is three times as many as in each of the last two presidential election years. The number of registered voters in the area is up 18 percent since January.
By comparison, in a prosperous area north of downtown with a similar number of voters who are overwhelmingly Republican, just 1,100 new voters have been added this year, increasing registration rolls by 7 percent.
These numbers are similar across Ohio. The Times examined registration from Jan. 1 to July 31 in a sample of counties that included seven of the state's nine largest, along with some smaller rural and suburban counties. Voters do not give a party affiliation when they register in Ohio, but The Times looked at the voting history of ZIP codes to gauge the political inclinations of the new voters.
In rock-ribbed Republican areas -- 103 ZIP codes, many of them rural and suburban areas, that voted by two to one or better for George W. Bush in 2000 -- 35,000 new voters have registered, a substantial increase over the 28,000 that registered in those areas in the first seven months of 2000. The Ohio Republican party said it was pleased with the results.
"It's not easy work, but we go door to door in strong Republican precincts, making sure everyone is registered," said Chris McNulty, the state party chairman.
But in heavily Democratic areas -- 60 ZIP codes mostly in the core of big cities like Cleveland, Dayton, Columbus and Youngstown that voted two to one or better against Mr. Bush -- new registrations have more than tripled over 2000, to 63,000 from 17,000.
In Florida, where The Times was able to analyze data from 60 of the state's 67 counties, new registrations this year also are running far ahead of the 2000 pace, with Republican areas trailing Democratic ones. In the 150 ZIP codes that voted most heavily for Mr. Bush, 96,000 new voters have registered this year, up from 86,000 in 2000, an increase of about 12 percent.
But in the heaviest of Democratic areas, 110 ZIP codes that gave two-thirds or more of their votes to Al Gore, new registrations have increased to 125,000 from 77,000, a jump of more than 60 percent.
In Duval County, where a confusing ballot design in 2000 helped disqualify thousands of ballots in black precincts, new registrations by black voters are up 150 percent over the pace of 2000.
"We're using guerrilla tactics to get into the malls and sign up voters before the security guards chase us off," said Adam Broad, 40, an organizer in Duval County with the Florida Consumer Action Network Foundation, one of dozens of community groups registering in Florida.
The groups are building nationwide databases of voters and have committed millions of dollars for continued contact with them before and on Election Day.
"If every Democrat showed up at the polls, you'd win, no question," said James Koehler, a precinct organizer in Columbus working for MoveOn.org, another soft-money group. Mr. Koehler said MoveOn hoped to have a volunteer in every precinct to call neighbors on Nov. 2.
But intensive voter contact and turnout are exactly what the Republicans believe they do best. Their plan calls for the same kind of sophisticated targeting, and a last-minute push for turnout called a 72-hour strategy, the plan Republicans used in 2002 to overwhelm incumbent Democrats like former Senator Max Cleland in Georgia.
Even before Election Day, the new voters may be having an impact on the campaign, because they may not be accurately reflected in the political polls.
"The people who are new voters are disengaged; they're less likely to respond to a poll question," said Philip Klinkner, a government professor at Hamilton College. (Ford Fessenden, "A Big Increase of New Voters in Swing States," <em>New York Times</em>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/26/politics/campaign/26vote.html">September 26, 2004</a>)</blockquote> -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>