Rock the Vote Registrations Not Going Through in New York City?

Update: Looks there were huge inaccuracies in this New York Times story. Read a correction/update here.
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Yikes. This is not good:

It has been more than two months since she clicked on the Rock the Vote Web site to print out her voter registration form — fast, easy and very cool, the celebrities promised — and Jaime Nieberg still cannot find a trace of herself at the city Board of Elections office in Brooklyn. She has crawled through the records, looking for every variation on her name.

“I’m completely not in the computer,” she said. “I am nonexistent. I’ve searched by date of birth, last name. I found my aunts, my mother, my uncles, my father.”

So what happened?

“They asked me, ‘Did you register with Rock the Vote?’ ” Ms. Moses said on Friday. “When I told them I had, they said: ‘Uh-oh. That’s a big mess. You’ll have to come down here by today.’ ”

It turns out that every registration application generated by Rock the Vote in New York State is printed with the wrong address — about 100,000 forms this year. Although voters in New York must register with the boards of elections in their home counties — in the city, they’re called boroughs — all the Rock the Vote applications were addressed to the New York State Board of Elections, which does not handle voter registrations.

It's NYC, so this isn't going to matter outside of municipal elections (it's not like this happened in, say, Colorado), but it's a pretty horrible scenario for those who potentially will be disenfranchised. Here's what Rock the Vote had to say:

“That’s not on Rock the Vote,” Stephanie Young, a spokeswoman for the group, said on Friday. “Once they register with Rock the Vote, they print it out and send it on themselves. We’re out of it after that. Then it’s on the State Board of Elections.”

Not exactly a satisfying response for those affected:

“The whole point is just print the application, fold it, staple it and send it,” Ms. Fuller said. “You’d assume that you’ve taken care of it then. If anyone is not going to follow up on this, it would be the younger demographic.”

I tend to agree with Ms. Fuller that Rock the Vote bears responsibility here. The whole point of RTV's online voter registration widget is to make registration as easy as possible, and these types of things should have been double and triple checked. Comments like Young's aren't going to resolve the situation and will do nothing except erode trust in Rock the Vote as an institution.

On a related note, this also presents a good argument for further implementation full online registration, as they have in Arizona and now California. If registration could be completed online with an electronic signature from your DMV file, there would be no need to mail signed forms to local Boards of Election offices at all. The simpler the voter registration process is, the fewer mistakes like this we'll see.