This may seem like weak tea, but as a former ACORN county coordinator I can tell you that it matters a lot.
The National Voter Registration Act of 1993, better known as the motor-voter law, is well-known for making it possible to register to vote at state motor vehicle offices. However, the law also required states to allow registration at offices that administer food stamps, welfare, Medicaid, disability assistance and child health programs. States were enthusiastic about the motor-vehicle section of the law, and millions of new voters got on the rolls while getting a driver’s license. But registration at public assistance offices proved far less popular.
In part, that was because of additional paperwork at those offices, but in many states, Republican officials did not want to provide easy entry to the voting rolls for low-income people whom they considered more likely to vote Democratic. The Bush administration devoted its attention to seeking out tiny examples of voter fraud and purging people from the rolls in swing states. It did little to enforce the motor-voter law despite years of complaints from civic groups and Democratic lawmakers.
ACORN didn’t do partisan registration. We did not ask people to register as a member of one party or another. We refrained from making partisan pitches for getting registered. But we did carefully select where to go to ask people to get on the voter rolls. And welfare offices, health clinics, and food stamp offices were definitely high on our list. I’ll freely admit that we knew we’d be registering a lot more Democrats than Republicans, but it was legal because we left politics out of it and just appealed to people’s civic duty. The right goes to megachurches and does the same thing.
The problem was that we shouldn’t have had to go to welfare offices and child health clinics because those places were supposed to have voter registration forms available to people. So, ACORN filed suit in Ohio and Missouri (and perhaps other places) and forced the state governments there to follow the law. But that won’t be necessary anymore.
After years of deliberate neglect, the Justice Department is finally beginning to enforce the federal law requiring states to provide voter registration at welfare and food stamp offices. The effort not only promises to bring hundreds of thousands of hard-to-reach voters into the electorate, but it could also reduce the impact of advocacy organizations whose role in registering voters caused such a furor in 2008.
Of course, ACORN didn’t mind any loss of impact that might have resulted from people following the law. If they worried about that, they wouldn’t have filed suit against Ohio and Missouri. What ACORN wanted was for low income citizens (mainly of color) to participate in the electoral process. And that crazy old community organizer in the White House is going to make sure that happens.
The administration will undoubtedly be accused of acting in a self-serving political way by making it easier for more Democrats to vote. The effort may have that effect. But it is worth remembering that the recession has brought millions of new people to food stamp and other welfare offices in the last two years, many of whom may not be traditional Democrats. In addition, government offices are much more likely to provide reliable registrations than Acorn or other advocacy groups that were widely accused of fraudulent sign-ups in the last cycle. Welfare offices generally have extensive methods of verifying identities in order to provide benefits, and it is illegal to provide false records there.
But the best reason to applaud the Justice Department’s new posture is that it will bring more voters into public life. When advocacy groups sued Ohio and Missouri to force their public assistance offices into complying, huge groups of new voters surged onto the rolls — more than 100,000 in Ohio, and more than 200,000 in Missouri. Nationwide enforcement by the Justice Department could add millions more. The more people who have access to the ballot, the better the country will be.
The right wing killed ACORN, but they just got checkmated by the president.
