Taylor Swift wants you to register to vote. KC election officials say do this first

When Taylor Swift encourages people to register to vote, they do it.

She championed voter registration last week while endorsing Kamala Harris for president. More than 400,000 people in just 24 hours followed her advice to visit vote.gov, a federal voting information site.

Voter registration campaigns right now are in high gear locally and across the country, on college campuses, in churches, on Broadway and on social media where stars including Queen Latifah and Sally Field are encouraging people.

Local election officials can’t say whether Swift’s pitch has had any impact on registrations locally, given how many other efforts are also underway. But they’re busy.

“We are seeing kind of an uptick in voter registration numbers overall,” Fred Sherman, Johnson County Election Commissioner, told The Star. “It’s difficult to say if it is specifically because of any one celebrity’s push or movement. But we are seeing an uptick.”

With voter registration deadlines looming, election officials in the Kansas City area working overtime to process all those requests say voters can help make that job easier if they do one small thing.

Check your current voter status before you register to vote so you don’t needlessly register twice, which creates more work for busy election offices like Sherman’s prepping for Election Day, Nov. 5.

“I would say, probably only about 1 in 5 submittals we’re getting right now are brand new voter registrations,” said Sherman. “Most of the ones we’re getting are probably either duplicates or someone may change their address or their phone number, something like that.

“Most of the forms we’re getting are not brand new voters.”

Avoiding duplicate registrations

Officials with the Jackson County Election Board also are finding duplicates in the mix of forms from new voters and people updating their information.

“Once you register with us or with the Secretary of State’s office, it’s a done deal,” said the board’s co-director Sara Zorich. “Not that you shouldn’t follow up. You should.

“But when you continue to re-register and re-register, through the DMV, the Secretary of State’s office, you send us another card, it’s just a duplicate. And we still have to go through the same process that we go through before we can determine whether it’s a duplicate or not.

“That has been happening quite a bit. So we may have thousands more registrations but half of those could be duplications.”

The voter registration deadline in Kansas is Oct. 15 and Oct. 9 in Missouri. Election officials on both sides of the state line are working a current uptick in applications, not unusual for a presidential election year, they say.

Asking people to check their voter status first is by no means meant to discourage them from registering, Sherman emphasized.

“It’s almost selfishly we’re saying do that because it does create additional work,” said Sherman. “Any voter registration form or application that’s submitted we have to work and process and post.

“So in the grand scheme of things having people register to vote is good. Yes, we encourage that. And if in doubt, it’s better to submit a new form than not.

“But it would be much more amenable in terms of our resources and efforts if people check first before they just blindly submit something.”

Zorich said that some folks worry if they can’t find their voter information online and wind up registering again, just in case, “which also causes some problems because we still have to go through and process and find out that, oh, that is a duplicate.”

Sherman also thinks some voters “basically following what the celebrities and folks are encouraging people to do, to register to vote” do so without first making sure they’re not already registered.

Record registration

Tuesday was National Voter Registration Day, when Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab announced the state “crossed a milestone” with 2 million registered voters, expected to grow before the October deadline.

Sherman said his office is “still trying to catch up ... in processing all those voter registrations. So we’re not completely up to date if people have turned stuff in or made a request in the last week or so.”

As far as new registrations, Zorich said, “I don’t know anything about an uptick just because someone is endorsing a candidate. What we have seen is the registration deadline is coming up ... National Registration Day, there was a big push for that.

“I know we had thousands (of registrations) pop in over the weekend. But that doesn’t seem necessarily abnormal for getting closer to the election and with the deadline coming up. There have been lots of groups that have been encouraging voting and it isn’t just because of one person.”

Voters in both Missouri and Kansas can register to vote online, where they can also check and update their voter information if they, say, change their address, name or want to add or change a party affiliation.

Missouri voters can see all their options at the Missouri Secretary of State’s website where it keeps a voter registration portal where you can verify your registration.

Registering in Kansas can be done online or by filing a paper document.

“I remind Kansans that the most secure way to register is through VoteKansas.gov,” Schwab said in a statement Tuesday. “The use of a .gov address ensures security and lets Kansans know they are accessing an official government site, rather than a third-party one.”

That voter look-up is where “we’ll post sample ballots and they can look up their polling site location for Election Day and they can check their voter registration status as well and see their voting history,” Sherman said.

“That technology and information is out there and is available. And I realize not everyone demographically is going to be comfortable getting online and checking.

“But instead of just blindly sending out new voter registrations it would be most helpful to us election administrators if you’re current and up to date and checking it first before submitting anything new.”