By Michael Slater
I posted yesterday on Hans von Spakovsky nomination, noting that a common theme that unifies his work “is not just that it advances his political party’s interests but that it does so by impeding minorities from voting and choosing their political representatives.” Now there’s more evidence.
In his July 23, 2001 testimony before the Senate Rules Committee, which he titled “Voter Fraud and Election Reform,” von Spakovsky recommended that the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) be amended to prohibit mail registration. He had made the same recommendation earlier in a policy paper written for the conservative Georgia Public Policy Institute. (Interestingly, he may have given up on this battle. He advocates in his Texas Law Review Journal article for administrative changes to mail registration rather than its outright ban.)
Why is this so significant and how is race implicated? Mail registration, which states were mandated to use with the passage of the NVRA, are a necessary component of large-scale voter registration drives. Before the Act’s passage, many states required individuals to show up in person to register to vote or register through an officially sanctioned “deputy registrar.” Needless to say, deputy registrars were not widely available in minority communities.
Mail registration was intended to change that situation by both lowering the “costs” of registration and by making registration readily available in minority communities. The legislative history of the NVRA shows that Congress included the provision specifically for the purpose of reaching traditionally under-represented communities “Since registration by mail was already in place in approximately half the states, and there was substantial evidence that this procedure not only increased registration but successfully reached out to those groups most under-represented on the registration rolls, this method of registration was considered appropriate for a national standard.” (H.R. Report 103-9 at 4)
The statute’s language even instructs states that they must distribute the mail form “with particular emphasis on making them available for organized voter registration programs.” 42 U.S.C. § 1973gg-4(b)
The mail form essentially created the modern era of voter registration drives.
By 2004, 21 percent of registered voters had registered by mail; either on their own initiative (12.5 percent) or through a voter registration drive (8.5 percent). (See “The Politics of Voter Fraud” by Loraine Minnite at page 18.) In states with contested elections, the mail form is even more significant. As part of litigation challenging restrictions on voter registration drives (League of Women Voters of Florida v Cobb), attorneys presented evidence that just 9 organizations had helped 524,000 Floridians register to vote in 2004, almost 20 percent of all registrations processed by the state that year. (Complaint at 14)
And of course, voter registration drives have been a signature expression of Black politics since the Civil Rights era. The numbers bear out the reliance of Blacks on voter registration drives. Blacks (and Hispanics) are 65% more likely to be registered to vote as a consequence of a voter registration drive than Whites. (Minnite at 19)
Von Spakovsky, unsurprisingly, argues this prohibition is necessary to stop voter fraud. Yet, there is little evidence that fraudulent voting is undermining elections. As the New York Times reported, despite the Justice Department’s best efforts, they were only able to secure 28 convictions against individual voters in a 5-year period and turned up “up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections.” But then again, the true arc of von Spakovsky’s career has nothing to with voter fraud and everything to with minority voting.
Michael Slater is the Deputy Director of Project Vote.