Correspondences and singular varieties

What is generally known as the "Bloch--Srinivas method" consists of decomposing the diagonal of a smooth projective variety, and then considering the action of correspondences in cohomology. In this note, we observe that this same method can also be extended to singular and quasi--projective varieties. We give two applications of this observation: the first is a version of Mumford's theorem, the second is concerned with the Hodge conjecture for singular varieties.