CHARLOTTE, N.C. — A letter has been sent to almost 370,000 people in North Carolina, claiming to be their “Voting Report Card.” It gives the voter a grade based on how many times they voted in the state’s election over the past four years.
Charlotte voter Leather Anderson received the letter. She told Channel 9 she can’t remember if her score read ‘below average’, but said it wasn’t good.
“How would they really know? They have only had the two times I voted, and I've been in Mecklenburg County for over 20 years,” Anderson said.
She said she voted in 2008 and 2012, but doesn’t remember voting in 2014.
Voter Athena Valentine thought the letter represented an invasion of privacy.
“We shouldn't be judged on how well we vote compared to the state (average) or anybody else on how we vote,” she said.
The group Voter Participation Center is a non-profit and non-partisan organization dedicated to increasing voter registration and turnout.
Page Gardner, president and founder of Voter Participation Center sent us this statement:
The Voter Participation Center (VPC) is a non-profit and non-partisan organization dedicated to increasing the participation of historically underrepresented Americans in our democracy. Since its founding, VPC has helped more than 3 million Americans register to vote and vote.
In 2014, nearly 1 million African Americans, Latinos, millennials and unmarried women in North Carolina were eligible to vote but failed to do so. That’s an alarming number, and the Voter Participation Center is doing something about it. We use voter “report cards” to encourage citizens to vote, and to ensure that our democracy is truly representative. In North Carolina, we recently mailed about 375,000 voter report cards to eligible voters.
U.S. citizens should have the ability to easily vote, and we should applaud efforts that help get more Americans on our voter rolls.
Anderson, an unmarried African-American woman, said the letter did encourage her to vote, but she had already planned to make it to the polls. She voted Monday in the 2016 presidential election.
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