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The Pasco elections supervisor gets crates of the cards back, many with undeliverable addresses.
By BRADY DENNIS, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published August 14, 2002
DADE CITY -- Kurt Browning said Tuesday that a bevy of reasons caused nearly 50,000 voter ID cards -- nearly one in every five he mailed -- to be returned last week.
"It was an issue that caught us a little off guard," said Browning, the Pasco supervisor of elections, about the crates of returned mail that piled up in his office.
After a week of research by two companies that helped prepare the mass mailing, Browning said, this is what they found:
-- About half the cards were returned with undeliverable addresses. In most cases, people had moved and left either no forwarding addresses or incomplete ones. In other cases, people had filled out change of address forms only for themselves, instead of alerting the post office that addresses of all family members had changed.
-- About 35 percent of the returns were marked "temporarily away," meaning they were most likely intended for snowbirds who have left for the summer but plan to return.
-- About 12.5 percent were returned marked with valid forwarding addresses, but Browning had requested that none of the cards be forwarded, so those came back.
-- The remaining 2.5 percent consisted of cards mailed to deceased people, mailing agents who refused them, out-of-county addresses or military people.
Browning said that had his office run voter addresses through the National Change of Address database more frequently, he might have caught some of the errors, but by no means all of them.
He said that voters themselves must take the initiative to keep their records up to date, or else problems are sure to arise on election day.
"I think it's a shared responsibility between voters and my office," Browning said. "People have a responsibility to keep their records current."
Browning said he will continue to try to make sure voters know where to vote in the upcoming Sept. 10 primary, especially because of recent redistricting and the fact that Pasco has added 19 new precincts.
He also will send out another mass mailing of sample ballots to voters. This batch will be mailed at a cheaper nonprofit rate -- much less than the $66,000 needed to send the ID cards -- but none of them will be returned by the post office. The sample ballots will be tailored to each district.
For more information, contact the supervisor of elections office at (352) 521-4302 in east Pasco, (813) 929-1288 in central Pasco, (727) 847-8162 in west Pasco, or online at www.pascovotes.com.