Despite mass voter reg. efforts, overall number of reg. voters down.

[Mabus]

This is something I still can't figure out. In 2002 (Oct) there were 1,615,699 people registered to vote in Kansas. http://www.kssos.org/elections/02elec/voterreg102102.html

In 2004 (July-certified) there were 1,591,428 people registered to vote in Kansas. http://www.kssos.org/elections/04elec/voterreg071904.html

That's an overall decrease of 24,271 people registered to vote in Kansas in two years. A decrease in the number of registered voters in spite of numerous voter registration drives from all camps and the number of people who were registering for the first time. In fairness, both the Dems and Pugs lost approximately 13,000 voters from their rolls.

Have some people just stopped caring altogether?

This a cross-posting of sorts, here's where I posted this information originally on DU http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=309399&mesg_id=309440

[SheilaT]

1. In between those two dates

the voter registration files were "purged", which means duplicate registrations, and registrations of people who hadn't voted in a few cycles were removed. And at that, they didn't get rid of a lot of invalid registrations.

I know, because when I was campaigning, going door to door with the most up-to-date lists possible, I'd still find households with more than people registered who hadn't lived there in years, according to those who now lived there.

So what's an apparent drop in registrations, is just a cleaning up of the list.

It's like the way the front page of DU shows over 63,000 registered users. But that includes everyone who's ever been tombstoned and all those who for some reason have more than one registration. I wish they'd also post how many are on-line at any time, or how many have been on-line within the past week. That would be a much more accurate picture of how many of us there really are here.