Weekly Voting Rights News Update
By Erin Ferns
Despite the intense media spotlight on the presidential primaries and Indiana’s voter ID case in the Supreme Court, the issues of voter participation and voting rights are still grossly underreported. This week, Project Vote cited Colorado for failure to follow the federal National Voter Registration Act – a 1993 law created to increase the number of eligible citizens registered to vote – in a report released on Monday. Project Vote found the state was in poor compliance with a section of the law requiring voter registration applications to be offered at public assistance agencies – an effort to reduce disparities in voting population based on race and income.
NVRA’s well known “Motor Voter” feature, which instructs states to offer voter registration to citizens applying for or renewing driver’s licenses, has helped millions of Americans register or update their information every year. However, the same efforts have not been put forth to comply with Section 7 of the law in many states, which requires voter registration at agencies other than the DMV “to ensure that ‘the poor and persons with disabilities who do not have driver’s licenses [would]…not be excluded from those for whom registration will be convenient and readily available.'” Although mandated by federal law since 1995, negligence by large numbers of states has hampered the law’s intent to close the representational gap in the voting population.
“In 2006, human service agencies in some of the state’s largest counties, including El Paso, Arapahoe and Weld, did not register a single person to vote, according to the report by Project Vote, which works to increase civic engagement” wrote Myung Oak Kim in the Rocky Mountain News Tuesday.
Released Monday, the report by Jody Herman and Douglass Hess documents the state’s consistently low rates of registration in public assistance offices despite the state’s significant population of unregistered, low-income citizens. Of the 900,000 unregistered adult citizens in Colorado in 2006, 229,000 had household incomes below $25,000 and are likely to be in contact with public assistance offices, the report found. A Project Vote analysis of the 2006 electorate illustrates the drastic disparities in the electorate: Low-income citizens comprise of 21% of the voting eligible population, but just 60% of them are registered to vote. In comparison, those earning $100,000 or more make up a smaller portion (19%) of the voting eligible population, but have the greatest voting power with 81% registered in that income bracket. Find more in this 2007 Project Vote report, “Representational Bias in the 2006 Electorate.”
“If [Colorado] had followed the requirements of the NVRA more diligently, the disparity in registration rates between rich and poor would likely be much less profound,” said Herman in the press release Monday.
The report, one in a series of reports on NVRA compliance in the states, examines the following “possible explanations” for lackluster voter registration performance, but ultimately concludes poor performance is a result of poor compliance with the NVRA.
1)There is a decline in participation in public assistance programs and many of those participating are non-citizens.
Although participation in public assistance programs declined in the 1990s, participation has actually increased in the last decade. Further, “only a small number of adults participating in public assistance programs are non-citizens.” For example, approximately 117,000 adults participated in the Food Stamp Program and only 7,000 were non-citizens.2)The successful NVRA mandated registrations at the Department of Motor Vehicles “crowds out” the opportunity for public assistance agencies to register new voters.
While DMV registrations fluctuated over a decade, there are no visible trends to make the correlation between the DMV’s success in registering voters and public assistance agency performance. Given the 229,000 unregistered, low-income citizens, “there is a large untapped population of unregistered citizens that public assistance offices are not reaching with required voter registration services,” the report said.3)Public assistance offices are registering voters, but are not reporting the numbers, skewing performance records.
While Herman and Hess acknowledge a “reporting problem in many jurisdictions, data collected by [community organization,] Colorado ACORN reveal that public assistance offices in Colorado are not in compliance with NVRA.” In November and December 2007, the group visited the offices of WIC, TANF and Food Stamp services in four counties. They found that more than half of the surveyed offices did not have voter registration forms available upon request, nor did they provide them in application materials.
The state is currently addressing the issue. According to the Associated Press, “Hess said he met with representatives from the secretary of state’s office last month and said they are taking steps to put together training for county workers as well as a new system to monitor compliance with the law.” See the report for state recommendations on how to successfully comply with the law.
NVRA non-compliance is not exclusive to Colorado. On Tuesday, Project Vote and Demos notified Arizona and Florida Secretaries of State that the states failed to offer voter registration services to low income citizens, as required by NVRA.
“Other states that have recently made compliance with this requirement a priority have experienced significant gains in public agency registration rates. One in 5 Iowans, for example, who access public assistance register to vote since that state took steps to improve compliance,” Project Vote’s press release said. The potential to bring millions of new voters into the electoral process via aggressive implementation of Section 7 of the NVRA cannot be overstated. Thirteen years ago, 2.6 million registered to vote through agency registration, while only 527,752 did so in 2006. Voting rights activists and those who prize fair and representative elections should closely examine their own state’s efforts (or lack thereof) in implementing Section 7 and demand compliance with the law.
Quick Links
Contact
Contact the office of Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman here.
To find out the contact information for your own Secretary of state go here
Webpages
Reports
“Investigating Voting Rights in Colorado: An Assessment of Compliance with the National Voter Registration Act in Public Assistance Agencies.” Project Vote. Jan. 28, 2008.
“Maximizing Voter Registration Opportunities at Public Assistance Agencies.” NVRA Implementation Project. November 2005.
“Ten Years Later: A Promise Unfulfilled. The National Voter Registration Act in Public Assistance Agencies, 1995-2005.” NVRA Implementation Project. July 2005.
Other Sources:
“Public Agency Registration Model Bill.” NVRA Implementation Project. July 2005.
“A Summary of the National Voter Registration Act.” Project Vote. March 2006.
In Other News:
“Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann says Mississippi shouldn’t wait for a court decision before enacting a voter identification law.” Read more of this Associated Press report here.
“Fewer than half of the ballots cast in November by voters who lacked photo identification were ultimately counted, according to data provided to The Associated Press by the Georgia Secretary of State.” Read more of this AP story here.
Erin Ferns is a Research and Policy Analyst with Project Vote’s Strategic Writing and Research Department (SWORD).