(Conservative hostility to democracy is becoming increasingly overt. Project Vote shines a light on the most recent developments that ought to alarm all Americans. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Minnesota has some of the most progressive voter registration laws in the country, laws like same day registration and vouching, that are designed to maximize turnout and get as many voices as possible heard on Election Day. Some newly elected members of the Minnesota state legislature, however, have recently announced that they intend to repeal those laws as soon as they take office. These laws, they claim, leave the state vulnerable to voter fraud, so vulnerable they apparently must be repealed immediately, despite their obvious benefits.
Like Don Quixote charging at windmills, believing them to be monsters, these state legislators are gearing up to fight imaginary threats. Voter fraud, contrary to the media perception, is incredibly rare. According to a study by the nonpartisan group Citizens for Election Integrity Minnesota, only twenty-six people were convicted of voter fraud in Minnesota in 2008, all of them convicted felons who are restricted from voting. In other words, less than nine-ten thousandths of one percent of Minnesota voters (.0009 percent), were convicted of voter fraud in 2008. At the national level, a report by Dr. Lorraine Minnite, director of research at Project Vote and former assistant professor of American and urban politics at Barnard College, found that only 24 people were convicted of voter fraud between 2002 and 2005.
So, these state legislatures are trying to repeal laws that make it easier for all Minnesotans to vote, on the off-chance that repealing those laws might discourage some twenty-odd convicted felons from showing up on Election Day. Certainly, what little voter fraud there is should be prevented, but not at the cost of repealing laws that provide tremendous benefits to legitimate voters. In 2004, the six states with same day registration had turnout rates almost 12 percent above the national average, but the newly elected Minnesota legislators are more worried about the two dozen felons who might be voting illegally, than the thousands of legitimate voters who may be prevented from voting at all if these laws are repealed.
If the state legislatures want to fix elections in this country, if they want to protect the sanctity of the democratic process, they should not be focused on the .00009 percent of ineligible citizens who vote illegally--oftentimes unknowingly--due to criminal convictions. Instead, they should focus on reforming current law to allow non-incarcerated felons to automatically regain their right to vote and the 50-plus percent of eligible voters who did not even cast a ballot on Election Day, finding ways to increase turnout, not lower it.
Anthony Balady is a legal intern at Project Vote and second-year student at William & Mary Law School. Mr. Balady also serves as vice president of William & Mary's Election Law Society and editor-in-chief of its election law blog, State of Elections.
This morning, Democracy Now! had a segment, "How Safe Is Your Ballot? Tracking Voter Suppression, Intimidation on Election Day", with Wendy Weiser, of the Brennan Center for Justice. They talked at first about some of the various different "voter fraud" campaigns the Republicans are mounting, and in particular about Harris County, Texas, and the voter intimidation there. But then the discussion turned to the broader issue of how many people were not being registered in the first place:
AMY GOODMAN: The Brennan Center has also found registration patterns vary from state to state. But more than 26 percent fewer new voters registered in Florida this year than in 2006, along with 21 percent fewer in Maryland, almost 17 percent fewer in Tennessee. What does this mean?
WENDY WEISER: Yeah, we've been seeing a troubling pattern this year of dropping registration rates. They are much lower than they've been in many states from prior midterm elections. And one of the reasons for this--and this has raised some concern--is that there are far fewer efforts to register voters. We don't see large-scale voter registration drives out there the way there have been in past election cycles.
AMY GOODMAN: Like the disbanding of ACORN.
WENDY WEISER: Like the disbanding of ACORN, but this is--it's not only ACORN that's been affected by this attack on voter registration groups. Many groups that used to register voters aren't out there registering voters now.
AMY GOODMAN: Why?
WENDY WEISER:I think there was some kind of climate of fear created by those attacks on registration groups that have made it much more difficult for people to do that. This was a civic good that people were doing out of civic virtue, and they were worried about being attacked for engaging in these kinds of activities. In some cases, it's been laws that were passed that make it very difficult.
AMY GOODMAN:So this, the right's attack on ACORN and the congressional attack on ACORN, which was unprecedented, the disbanding of ACORN, not only affected this largest voter registration organization in the country, but had ripple effects everywhere.
WENDY WEISER: That is what we think has happened, yes.
This is the war we are fighting. Make no mistake. It is a war. It is a war for the right to vote. Whatever happens today, that war will continue. And we need to step it up.
TRENTON--The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, Project Vote, and the Fair Elections Legal Network submitted a brief seeking to ensure that the Department of Education fulfill a 25-year-old mandate to protect the voting rights of private, charter, and public school students, which the DOE has thus-far failed to meet.
“It is appalling that 25 years after the High School Voter Registration Law was issued, there are still no regulations on the books protecting the rights of private and charter school students under the law, and only the most minimal of protections for district public school students,” said Ed Barocas, the ACLU-NJ legal director.
A notoriously restrictive voter registration law was struck down in Arizona today after the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit issued its long-awaited decision in Gonzales v. Arizona. And it was worth the wait.
By a 2-1 vote (the majority included retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor), the court struck down Arizona's documentary proof of citizenship requirement for all new voter registrants because it is superseded by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA). Project Vote is a plaintiff in this case.
Just two weeks before Election Day, a potentially detrimental (and ultimately unlawful) voter registration procedure was uncovered in San Diego, Calif. that could affect the turnout of thousands of voters. San Diego CityBeat was on the story and contacted Project Vote in hopes of clearing the confusion before November 2.
Until this week, the San Diego County Registrar of Voters wrongfully denied the federal voter registration form that thousands of San Diegans completed after downloading it from the California Secretary of State Web site, including CityBeat reporter and voter hopeful, Dave Maass, who contacted Project Vote director of advocacy, Estelle Rogers, after his voter application was rejected, twice.
The nation is experiencing one of the greatest mobilization efforts ever seen for a midterm election. And young voters, as a result of their rising turnout rates in recent cycles, are increasingly becoming the target of those efforts. With voter registration deadlines fast approaching in many states, get-out-the-vote groups should take an additional look at the highly mobile college population and take advantage of a little-known federal voter registration law that helps them register to vote.
Tucked away in the Higher Education Act is a requirement that colleges and universities make an effort to help students register to vote by distributing voter registration applications by email or by paper (if distributed by email, the email must be solely dedicated to voter registration). Schools that do not do so risk losing millions in federal funding.
An estimated six to eight million part-and full-time students in 2010 are unregistered, according to a recent op-ed by Douglas Hess and Steven Rosenfeld: "Compliance with the HEA could easily facilitate the registration of hundreds of thousand of new, young voters and update the registrations of an equal number."
Registration deadlines start kicking in soon: the first few states stop accepting new registrations next Monday, October 4. So, it is imperative that schools take this opportunity to follow the law by reminding their students that time is running out if they want to register to vote in another historic election this November.
Schools and voter registration groups should:
Send an email to all students with voter registration forms as a link or a PDF attachment, and provide them with the deadline;
Remind students to print and mail their voter registration forms (unless they live in states that provide a completely online voter registration service);
Continue to supplement voter registration emails with in-class registration or voter registration tables.
Click here to see a list of voter registration deadlines. If your state’s deadline is several weeks away, consider sending one email now and another the week before the deadline. (Schools in six states are exempt from this law: Idaho, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.)
Access to voter registration-the basis of democratic participation-is still limited in the 21st century by overly restrictive, "horse-and-buggy" laws across the country. Despite advances in technology, states struggle with politically charged or neglected election systems when such systems can (and should) simply focus on building a truly representative electorate in modern day America.
Participating in democracy should be a simple exercise for anyone who is a citizen over the age of 18, but as voter registration and turnout stats indicate, it’s not always that easy. On their way to the polls, too many people encounter barriers and obstacles, and too often these impediments are a result of varying, nuanced election administration procedures across the United States. As a new Project Vote report illustrates, examples of many of these election administration dos and don’ts can be found in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Another big state has taken steps to modernize voter registration at its motor vehicle offices. The Texas Department of Public Safety, which oversees state driver licenses and identification cards, has instituted a new system that simplifies the voter registration process.
A disturbing and growing hysteria over immigration—most evident in Arizona’s horrifyingly oppressive new law—has now spread into election administration legislation in at least one state. On the same day that the Maine Republican Party adopted a blatantly xenophobic Tea Party platform, the Tennessee Senate injected anti-immigrant sentiment into a draconian bill to require proof of citizenship when registering to vote.
Last week, the Maryland General Assembly passed a bill to allow 16-year olds to preregister to vote. If signed by the governor, Maryland will join Florida, Hawaii, North Carolina, and Rhode Island in enacting this important reform.
Although the 2008 presidential election showed unprecedented increases in turnout from underrepresented citizens, their rates of voter registration and participation were still well behind the electorate in general. As we approach election season, this pattern may only continue. Instead of taking steps to improve the administration of elections to encourage and facilitate voter participation from eligible citizens, lawmakers and elected officials are back to raising barriers to voting by implementing strict voter ID laws, as illustrated through high profile court battles, ballot initiatives, and fast-moving legislation
An appeal to an Indiana's court's decision to shut down the state's notorious voter ID law as unconstitutional was heard last week in the state Supreme Court.
Engaging young citizens in the democratic process is an issue that lawmakers and voting rights advocates have long attempted to address. But with most youth voter engagement efforts primarily targeting college-attending youth (who make up less than half of the population of 18-24 year olds and are more likely to register and vote), the problem of underrepresented youth is likely to remain unsolved.
As voter education and access to voter registration seem to go hand-in-hand with greater voter participation rates, more lawmakers and advocates are siding with a simple solution for youth voter engagement: preregistration. However, as the state legislatures demonstrate this year, support for this reform could not happen fast enough.
With a population of more than 30 million, California is one of the lowest ranking states in voter registration rates. Once registered, however, the vast majority of Californians show an interest in democratic participation by turning out to vote. In recognition of this gap, some California lawmakers are finding ways to make voter registration more accessible to citizens, including the tried and true method of providing access to voter registration and voting at the same time: Election Day Registration (EDR).
A seemingly harmless trend in voter list maintenance is to compare voter lists between states and cancel apparent matches. However, this method not only violates federal law, but has the potential to put thousands of voters at risk of wrongful purging. As a result, one of the first states to launch this trend has taken steps to ensure that voters are not improperly removed from the rolls and perhaps will serve as an example to states that may be putting voters at risk through these interstate compacts.
While there is nothing wrong with states sharing information in an attempt to keep their voter lists up-to-date, some state election officials think that they are justified in immediately removing a voter from their rolls if the computerized interstate database comparison reveals an apparent match with the name and birth date of a voter who has more recently registered out of state. Removal based on such a match without adequate notice to the voter is not only unreliable, it's also illegal under the National Voter Registration Act.
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