Complaints Abound Over Enforcement of Voter Registration Law
    By Greg Gordon
    McClatchy Newspapers

    Wednesday 06 June 2007

    Washington - Representatives of three liberal-leaning groups came to the Justice Department in 2004, armed with evidence that hundreds of public-assistance agencies had illegally failed to offer voter registration to their mostly poor and minority clients.

    Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act, which imposed the requirement, in 1993. But after these agencies registered 2.6 million people to vote in 1995-1996, the total registered plunged to about 1 million in 2003-2004.

    Michael Slater, the Oregon-based deputy director of the national registration group Project Vote, said officials of the Justice Department's civil rights division showed little interest in enforcing that part of the law.

    Officials for the three groups, as well as former lawyers in the division, cite the inaction by the Justice Department as further evidence that politics drove the Bush administration's operation of the nation's chief law enforcement agency.

    The Bush Justice Department, they said, has largely ignored the voter registration sections of the law while aggressively using a narrower provision to sue or threaten to sue states that have failed to purge the names of allegedly ineligible people from voter rolls.

    Such selective enforcement, in effect, benefits Republican candidates at election time.

    Joseph Rich, a former chief of the Justice Department's voting rights section, said that without enforcement of the registration requirement of the 1993 law, which a Democratic Congress passed, fewer Democrats are signed up to vote. Similarly, he said, purges aimed at ineligible voters hurt Democrats by knocking poor voters off the rolls even though they're legitimately registered because they frequently change addresses.

    Department spokesman Cynthia Magnuson said the division "vigorously defends all the voting laws it is charged with enforcing."

    Slater said representatives of Project Vote; Demos, a New York-based think tank; and People for the American Way, a civil rights group, met in 2004 with Rich, Alexander Acosta, the civil rights chief, and Hans von Spakovsky, Acosta's voting counsel.

    He said the groups' representatives told the Justice Department officials: "Look, we have physical hard evidence that states aren't doing this. They're taking their eye off the ball. We want to see some enforcement."

    Slater said Acosta and von Spakovsky listened quietly and then made comments to the effect of "hmmm" and "that's interesting," but took no action.

    Slater pointed to figures showing that compliance in most states is lagging.

    Social service agencies in Washington state took 8,881 registration applications in 2005 and 2006, compared with 22,859 in 1995 and 1996.

    Missouri recently advised the federal Election Assistance Commission that its agencies took 15,568 applications in 2005-2006, down from 143,135 in 1995-1996.

    Magnuson, the Justice Department's spokeswoman, disputed assertions that the enforcement was lax. She said the department sued Tennessee in 2002 and New York in 2004 over their agencies' failure to offer voter registration.

    But former department lawyers, who declined to be quoted by name because they feared retaliation, noted that the Tennessee suit was prepared before the Bush administration began to sharply shift the Justice Department's civil rights policies. The New York suit, they said, targeted only agencies offering assistance to disabled students at public universities and colleges.

    After Tennessee settled the lawsuit, the state's public assistance agencies took 173,927 registration applications in 2003-04 - more than triple the number in the previous two-year period, data compiled by the Election Assistance Commission show.

    Tennessee, Colorado and Maryland are the only states whose registration numbers didn't decline from figures eight years earlier. Maryland agencies, however, took only 1,867 applications in 2003-2004, an increase from 982 in the earlier period.

    Another state where compliance improved was North Carolina.

    State Elections Director Gary Bartlett recently drew praise from Demos for dramatically improving adherence to the law after responding to watchdog groups' criticism.

    After falling 73.4 percent between 1995-1996 and 2003-2004, registrations have surged. Twenty-two counties registered more voters in February 2007 than they did in all of 2005.

    "We're not proud that we let it sleep," Bartlett said. He said that he wrote a 13-point plan and sent letters and e-mails notifying more than 1,300 agencies in the state of their obligations. He also designed a poster for every office. Democratic Gov. Mike Easley also sent each agency a letter, he said.

    When an investigator for Project Vote crisscrossed Missouri last spring, however, the picture wasn't so bright.

    Nyana Miller said she went to 14 public-assistance agencies in the St. Louis and Kansas City metropolitan areas in early May and asked for benefit applications.

    "Nobody ever asked me, `Would you also like to register to vote?'" as required by the law, she said.

All republished content that appears on Truthout has been obtained by permission or license.