Going from door to door to track displaced voters

HOUSTON -- For weeks, election volunteer Thomas Louis Wells has roamed apartment complexes like the Coral Gables, an aging, inexpensive property that has become a temporary home to scores of Katrina evacuees.

He's not looking for Texas voters, however, but ones for New Orleans.

With a list of evacuees' apartment numbers in hand, he goes door to door urging residents to vote in the New Orleans mayor's race April 22 and offering to help them complete an absentee voter application.

The faces that appear in the doorways may be curious, wary, or downright annoyed by the interruption, but Wells -- an exterminator who battled New Orleans's insect population for years -- isn't easily discouraged.

''If there's anytime we should stand up and be heard, it's now," said Wells, a volunteer for the Metropolitan Organization, a nonpartisan community advocacy group. ''What happens to New Orleans should be what we want, not what they tell us they're going to do."

Across the nation, volunteers are searching high and low for tens of thousands of displaced hurricane survivors who may not have the time, motivation, or know-how to register for a mail ballot.

It is crucial that voters who have not yet returned to New Orleans have a say in the city's future, said Ginny Goldman, head organizer in Texas for the social justice group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN.

''If people want to get their neighborhoods rebuilt, their utilities hooked back up, they'll have to show they having voting power," she said. ''We want people to turn their emotion into action. It sends the strong message that people aren't going to sit back and throw their hands up."

ACORN plans to send bus caravans to Louisiana from Houston and five other cities, so that Katrina survivors can vote in person.

The Metropolitan Organization has launched absentee voter drives in Atlanta, Dallas, and other cities with significant numbers of evacuees, but Houston -- with 150,000 Katrina survivors -- is the biggest target area.

Volunteers have tracked down voters in apartment complexes, job fairs, churches, parking lots with Louisiana license plates, and ''wherever people meet," said Rudy Adams, a retired high school teacher from New Orleans east.

The group has also organized what it calls an accountability session for April 8 in New Orleans: Mayoral candidates will answer questions during a videoconference that will be broadcast live to Houston, Memphis, Austin, and other cities with large numbers of evacuees.

But three weeks before the election, it is unclear how many displaced voters will take part in the election or how powerful a voting bloc they will be.

The Metropolitan Organization set a goal of registering 10,000 absentee voters in Houston; 1,600 people have signed up so far. Organizers say the numbers will grow as the election nears. Nationwide, fewer than 10,000 people have requested absentee ballots, according to the Louisiana secretary of state's office.