EDITORIAL- Better monitoring of mass registration

Imagine a job that allows you to make a little extra money while participating significantly… Imagine a job that allows you to make a little extra money while participating significantly in the political process. You spend some time outdoors talking to people. You may even become a neighborhood celebrity. If this entices you, then you should consider a profession registering people to vote.

It’s what Chad Staton, of Toledo, Oh., did for the past few months. He was asked by Georgianne Pitts to register as many people as he could. But Staton didn’t get money in return for his hard work. Pitts admitted to paying Staton with crack cocaine for more than 100 registration forms in lieu of money.

This is obviously a problem. But wait; it gets worse. As horrible as this is, the situation is only worsened by the fact that the forms Staton handed in were fictitious. The Defiance County Sheriff’s Office arrested Staton on a charge of False Registration in Violation of Section 3599.11 of the Ohio Revised Code — a felony in the fifth degree.

When Defiance Deputies and Toledo Police Department detectives searched the home of the woman who hired Staton, they confiscated drug paraphernalia, along with voter registration forms. When caught, Pitts informed authorities that she had been recruited to register people to vote by Thaddeus J. Jackson II. Jackson is the Assistant National Voter Fund Ohio Director of the NAACP National Voter Fund.

Ohio, a battleground state, emerged as an epicenter for the mobilization. According to an Oct. 18 New York Times article, “Registration in the state has soared to a record 7.8 million voters, an increase of 700,000 since the beginning of the year.” The National Voter Fund claims to have registered 80,000 voters in the state.

That’s great! The people who have worked to get so many people registered should be paid. Hard work should go neither unnoticed nor without reward. But paying with illegal substances? Incidents like that only bring the integrity of the NVF into question and make it harder to acknowledge and appreciate the hours of work put in to turn out such a number.

Even here on campus, it seemed as if there was a greater push to get people registered to vote in the upcoming election. Again, this is a good thing. But it seems as if the corruption in voter registration, as seen in the Staton case, is indicative of a system based on numbers. Because of the misguided focus on the number of forms completed or the amount of grant money available for completed forms turned in, voter registration fraud has been investigated not only in Ohio, but also in Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada and Oregon.

Excitement and mobilization of people toward a good cause — voting — are noble, but when people lose sight of that goal, there is a heightened potential for errors and corruption.

The government needs to enforce the laws in place to protect against fraudulence. Keep the voter registration and upcoming get-out-the-vote campaigns legal.