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City Commissioners mum on size/existence of registration backlog
Here's an electoral tidbit for you: tomorrow, Friday, will make it just four whole days from the election and four whole days since the date Philadelphia City Commissioner Stephanie Singer said the commissioners would clear a backlog of unprocessed voter registrations. And with just days to go, the backlog, as far as this reporter knows, has not been cleared.
City Commissioners mum on size/existence of registration backlog
Here's an electoral tidbit for you: tomorrow, Friday, will make it just four whole days from the election and four whole days since the date Philadelphia City Commissioner Stephanie Singer said the commissioners would clear a backlog of unprocessed voter registrations.
And with just days to go, the backlog, as far as this reporter knows, has not been cleared. It wasn't cleared as of yesterday morning, when the City Commissioners didn't convene for their usual Wednesday meeting, which was canceled earlier in the week; and it wasn't cleared as of yesterday evening, when City Commissioner Al Schmidt confirmed to City Paper that the commissioners' staff were alternating between processing absentee ballots and new voter registrations, which were due on Oct. 9.
Schmidt, the only City Commissioner to return City Paper's emails and calls since yesterday, promised that the registrations will be processed before the election.
“Every person who submitted a valid registration will be processed by election day,” he said. “In 2008, there was a similar rush of registrations … This is completely typical.”
Maybe so – but it's been nearly a month since that rush ended, and City Commissioners have already fallen short of stated goals in working through the backlog.
On Oct. 17, city commissioners announced a backlog of 41,000 unprocessed registrations. They also announced, according to the Committee of Seventy, which has been keeping an eye on preparations for the upcoming election, that they would be working overtime and processing roughly 5,500 per day. But on Oct. 24, a week later, the backlog had been reduced by about 13,000 – not the 38,500 that 5,500 per day would have yielded.
After that meeting, City Commissioner Stephanie Singer separately told Newsworks' Dave Davies and City Paper's Samantha Melamed that the backlog would be cleared by this past Sunday.
But as of Wednesday night, the backlog remained. (Schmidt said he couldn't say offhand how big it was).
While Schmidt promised yesterday that all registrations will be processed before election day, the backlog means that voters may not receive voter cards — which are not necessary to vote, but which contain important voting information and confirm a registration. What's more, voters worried their application got lost in the system won't necessarily know — since the City Commissioners can't check applications they haven't processed.
Then there's the question of what will happen to registrations filled out incorrectly that are being processed at the eleventh hour. Normally, voters are notified and given a chance to correct the application; but it's getting hard to see how that will happen before Election Day.
Yesterday, Seventy sent the commissioners a letter expressing concern over the moving of Wednesday's meeting (Schmidt told CP yesterday the decision to move the meeting was made in advance of Hurricane Sandy on Monday and that the change was immediately posted online) and over the backlog of unprocessed registrations as well as another (rolling) backlog of absentee ballots and absentee ballot applications.
Commissioners Singer, Schmidt, and Clark didn't return email requests for comment today. The City Commissioners will hold their stated meeting tomorrow, at 11 a.m.
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