On Thursday, October 22, ProPublica wrote an in depth piece attempting to examine the work of VPC and CVI. The article was filled with errors, inaccuracies and a failure to understand our elections systems and how Covid-19 has impacted elections.
Below is a response to Stephen Engelberg, Editor-In-Chief of ProPublica, written by our President and Chief Executive Officer Tom Lopach:
ProPublica’s recent article on the Voter Participation Center and Center for Voter Information contains multiple factual inaccuracies and shows an overall misunderstanding of the state of voting in the United States and the important work that we do. The piece overstates the significance of a relatively small number of errors common to any organization sending tens of millions of pieces of mail each year, gives undue credence to election officials who are not aggressively registering voters or providing them access to voting by mail, and ignores the failure of election officials to maintain modern voting infrastructure resulting in the current poor state of voting in this country. Further, the article generally fails to recognize the inherent difficulties of registering voters in a balkanized election system, particularly in the middle of an unprecedented global pandemic, and does not attempt to understand the work necessary to reach hard-to-register voters.
In a pandemic, VPC’s and CVl’s vote-by-mail programs, early vote in-person programs, and get-out-the-vote programs are designed to provide voters important information they need to vote safely as part of the November 3 election.