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You’ve heard of “bed in a bag”? Now there’s “voter registration drive in a box.”
And a rather small box at that.
Orange County Supervisor of Elections Karen Castor Dentel debuted the registration-to-go kit, officially called the Election Outreach Kit, Tuesday during a press conference for National Voter Registration Day at the county’s downtown elections office.
“ A lot of people end up having to figure out how to have a voter registration drive on their own," Castor Dentel told VoxPopuli after the presser. “They don't know what information we have available. They don't always know how to display it or what information is important, so this has everything in it that they might need.”
Packed neatly into the kit are info sheets explaining how to get your mail-in ballot, where to find all 27 of the county’s early voting sites and, of course, the voter registration forms. There’s voter swag in there too.
“People like to have swag, so we have stickers and other things in there to attract people to the table,” Castor Dentel said during the press conference.
The kit also contains special envelopes to send the forms back to the Orange County elections office.
“They’re postage paid,” Castor Dentel explained. “We'll know them when we see them because they're blue. We'll know that they came from one of our voter registration drives.
Castor Dentel said that she hoped the voter registration kits would help reach “different pockets of the county that don't normally see a group doing a registration drive or voter information.”
There are approximately 1.2 million people over 18, voting age, in Orange County. 813,991 are registered to vote, according to the elections office website. By party, that breaks down as 316,787 Democrats; 227,173 Republicans; 18,298 Independents; 2,984 Boricua Party; and 237,584 with no party affiliation.
The voter registration kits are primarily intended for community organizations, but Blake Summerlin, public information officer, told VoxPopuli by email that individual requests will be considered while supplies last.
“We encourage those interested in receiving a kit to submit a request sooner rather than later,” he said. Click here to request a kit.
Using these kits, organizations hosting a voter registration drive do not have to worry about the risks associated with third-party voter registration organizations, such as incurring $250,000 fines for errors on registration forms. The increase in fines was implemented as part of 2023 anti-election fraud legislation passed by the Republican-led Florida Legislature, despite the lack of evidence of election fraud.
Castor Dentel explained organizations using the Election Outreach Kits will not be collecting registration forms from voters to then turn in to the elections office as many third-party voter registration organizations do.
“[Volunteers] are giving those forms to the voters who are registering and [voters are] the ones who put them in the envelopes provided,” Castor Dentel said. “[Voters] are explicitly being told to mail them back in those envelopes, so there is no group that is handling them.”
