TALLAHASSEE — Andrew Gillum has a math problem.
The former Tallahassee mayor’s Forward Florida Action, a voter registration group founded after the Democrat’s failed 2018 bid for Florida governor, said earlier this month that more than 100,000 new people were added to state voter rolls between April and the end of October because of its efforts.
The group hailed the figure as a milestone in a state that President Donald Trump won by fewer than 113,000 votes just three years ago.
But the Florida Division of Elections tells a different story.
Outside groups like Gillum’s added fewer than 27,000 voters to the rolls between January and the end of September, according to state data. And the overwhelming majority of the roughly half-million voters who have registered in the state this year did so at their local motor vehicle office.
Gillum, with great fanfare, launched his voter registration effort in April as a way to take down Trump in Florida. But as he aims for bragging rights, the question remains whether, after seven months, the effort has worked.
Joshua Karp, a spokesperson for both Gillum and Forward Florida Action, said the organization is not trying to inflate its numbers. He attributed the discrepancy between the group’s count and the state’s to the way the organization tracks its progress.
With the 2020 presidential election getting into full swing, Democrats and Republicans are racing to win advantage in the battleground state of Florida, where campaigns can be won or lost on the narrowest of margins — and where Democrats have been on the losing end of statewide races going back to the 1990s.
Democrats admit they have themselves to blame. The party’s registration efforts in the state have slipped, allowing valuable would-be voters to stay home during crucial elections.
And the race to round up potential voters is being run across the country. In Georgia, Democrat Stacey Abrams narrowly lost her 2018 bid for governor to Brian Kemp after Kemp, then secretary of state, purged hundreds of thousands of people from voter rolls. Now Abrams is moving to limit another Kemp purge by contacting more than 300,000 Georgians who could be booted from voter rolls as early as next month.
Gillum's Forward Florida Action considers anyone who filled out an application — whether for the first time or just to update their address — as a “new” voter. The rationale is that failures to update address changes could lead to votes not getting counted.
Gillum said it’s a “difference without a distinction” because the goal is to make sure people vote.
“This is not just about adding numbers to the rolls,” Gillum told POLITICO. “This is about getting these folks situated so when we target them on the turnout side that we are basically producing a voter.”
That viewpoint isn’t shared by some experts who track voter registration
“A new voter is someone who has not been registered before,” said Dan Smith, a University of Florida political science professor who regularly analyzes the state’s voter file and testified as an expert witness in a lawsuit challenging Florida's limits on felon voting rights.
Forward Florida Action is basing its totals on a state database tracking voter applications — not all of which will be accepted and converted to voter registrations.
Efforts by two groups allied with the Gillum effort so far have taken credit for far fewer than 100,000 applications. The Florida Democratic Party turned in some 15,000 applications between April, when Gillum’s group launched, and the end of October. Gillum’s political committee donated $100,000 to the party to help with the voter registration push.
Another group allied with Gillum’s effort, New Florida Majority, has turned in fewer than 25,000 voter applications.
When Gillum first announced his voter registration efforts he said his goal was to to register and “re-engage” a million voters to defeat Trump in the nation’s largest swing state.
Part of the plan was to reach out to an estimated 4 million residents who are eligible but not registered to vote. Gillum also has vowed to engage with people who voted in 2012 when President Barack Obama was on the ballot but who sat out the 2016 contest.
Gillum set up a new nonprofit, Forward Florida Action, to coordinate his voter registration campaign and shifted $500,000 from his political committee to help pay for it.
Instead of directly registering voters, Forward Florida Action has distributed $1 million among 22 groups, including the Florida Democratic Party, to do the actual work of signing up voters. Such groups can tap into their established grassroots and progressive organizations to help meet their goals, according to Forward Florida Action.
Karp declined to disclose Forward Florida Action’s donors and expenses and would not identify the groups receiving money for the voter registration drive.
UF’s Smith said he has been skeptical of voter registration numbers thrown out by various groups in the last several years.
“There is very little accountability for many of the groups doing voter registration drives,” Smith said. “There is a lot of credit-claiming and very little accountability.”
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine