Turns out the voter registration surge in Ferguson didn't happen after all

Droves of people in Ferguson, Missouri supposedly registered to vote after the shooting death of Michael Brown.

But the increase in voter registrations apparently didn’t actually occur.

The County Board of Elections said just 128 people have registered to vote since the August shooting, a sizable reduction from the 3,287 figure it had announced previously, Talking Points Memo, which cites tweets from a USA Today reporter, reported on Tuesday.

The St. Louis County director of elections told TPM that the mistake was simply an error.

Advocacy organizations like the NAACP had urged residents to register to vote in the wake of the shooting and subsequent protests. While the city is largely African-American, city officials are overwhelmingly white.

Anthony Anthony Gray, an attorney for Michael Brown’s family, told USA Today that Michael Brown supporters could make Ferguson’s political leadership more diverse and receptive to the population by registering to vote.

“It could completely change the political landscape, the power structure, the decision making,” Gray said. “The service to the African-American community would almost quadruple because they would be viewed as a credible and legitimate voting block.”