-Caveat Lector-
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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: July 18, 2007 5:47:02 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED],
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: DoJ Pushing States to Do *Florida-Style* Purge of Voters
Before 2008 Elections
Bush Government to Poor Voters:
We Don't Want You to Vote
By Steven Rosenfeld
AlterNet, July 18, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/56957/
State welfare offices across the country are not offering millions
of low-income Americans the opportunity to register to vote when
applying for public assistance despite a federal law requiring them
to do so, according to an analysis of a recent federal voting
registration report and experts who say the Department of Justice
and states are to blame.
"It's huge. It's another area where the administration is failing
us," said Donna Brazile, chair of the Democratic National
Committee's Voting Rights Institute, speaking of the Department of
Justice's oversight of the nation's voter registration laws. "They
are not pushing states to recognize their voter registration
responsibilities."
At the same time, the Justice Department's Voting Section, which
enforces voting rights and supervises elections in some states, is
pressuring 10 states to do more to purge voter rolls -- or remove
ineligible voters -- before the 2008 presidential election,
according to letters sent to state election officials this spring.
"We conducted an analysis of each state's total voter registration
numbers as a percentage of citizen voting age population," wrote
John Tanner, the Department of Justice Voting Section chief, in an
April 18, 2007, letter to North Carolina's top election official.
"We write now to assess the changes in your voter registration
list ... and the subsequent removal of persons no longer eligible
to vote."
Cynthia Magnuson, a Justice Department spokeswoman, confirmed in an
e-mail that similar letters had been sent to 10 states, but did not
list the recipients. "The Department actively works with all states
to comply with all provisions of the statutes we enforce," she said.
Voter lists are updated because people move, die or lose their
right to vote if convicted of felonies. But because this process
occurs out of public view and without much regulation, it can be
open to partisan abuse or produce incorrect results, such as in
Florida in 2000 when an estimated 50,000 voters were incorrectly
removed from voter registration lists.
The contrast of a Justice Department that apparently has not
enforced voter registration opportunities for poor people -- who
tend to vote Democratic -- and a department that is pressuring
states to more thoroughly trim voter rolls has prompted some voting
rights advocates to accuse the agency of selective enforcement and
partisan bias.
"I think it's pretty clear the Justice Department is pursing a
partisan agenda to get states to purge voters while ignoring
requirements to get states to register voters," said Michael
Slater, deputy director of Project Vote, a national nonprofit
specializing in voter registration drives targeting low- and
moderate-income families.
Voting Section chief John Tanner did return a telephone call to
discuss his office's priorities and accomplishments. On Monday,
July 16, the House Judiciary Committee announced it was postponing
a hearing scheduled for Tuesday, July 17 "because the Department
refused to make Voting Section chief John Tanner available to
testify," its press release said.
However, Hans A. Von Spakovsky, a former assistant attorney general
who served four years as a top Civil Rights Division lawyer
overseeing the Voting Rights Section discussed accusations of
changing "the enforcement direction of the department" in a June
29, 2007, letter to the Senate Rules Committee. He became a federal
elections commissioner in December 2005, and his appointment is
under review.
Von Spakovsky's 18-page letter is a detailed defense of some of the
department's most controversial recent rulings, such as approving a
Texas congressional redistricting plan and a Georgia voter I.D. law
that later was blocked in court as a violation of the
Constitutional amendment barring poll taxes. Nowhere in the often-
technical letter is any mention in section 7 of the National Voter
Registration Act (NVRA), which is intended to help poor people vote
by requiring state welfare agencies to offer the chance to register.
Instead, Von Spakovsky defended an aggressive stance with enforcing
the NVRA's voter purge provisions, which fall under section 8 of
the law. "The division could not willfully ignore the list
maintenance requirements of the NVRA," he wrote. "It is the
responsibility of DOJ to enforce these laws."
While the national media has followed the department's firing of
U.S. attorneys who, in some cases, did not pursue voter fraud cases
-- another priority of longtime GOP lawyer-activists like Von
Spakovsky -- the department's oversight of the nation's voter rolls
has mostly gone unnoticed. The potential impact on the 2008
election could be enormous, however, especially if millions of
disenfranchised people registered and voted.
A just-released federal voter registration report reveals the
stakes. In late June, the Election Assistance Commission issued a
biennial voter registration report to Congress for 2005 and 2006.
The report found that 16.6 million new registration applications
were received by state motor vehicles agencies while only 527,752
applications came from state public assistance offices -- a 50
percent drop from 2003-2004. The report also found 13.0 million
voters were purged nationwide and 9.9 million were put on
"inactive" status, meaning these people have to provide
identification before receiving a 2008 ballot.
The potential number of public assistance recipients who could
register runs into the millions. According to the Health Resources
and Services Administration's FY 2008 budget, federally subsidized
"health centers" will serve an estimated 16.3 million patients, a
population where "91 percent are at or below 200 percent of the
federal poverty level, 64 percent are from racial/ethnic minority
groups and 40 percent are uninsured." This is the same population
who typically seek a variety of federally subsidized public
assistance, from food stamps to fuel assistance to welfare.
Another indication of how many poor people could register is
Tennessee, whose elections are federally supervised. From
2005-2006, Tennessee registered 120,992 people at public assistance
offices -- nearly a quarter of the national total, the EAC
reported. Tennessee registered more voters than the combined totals
of welfare office registrations from California, Colorado, Florida,
Illinois, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Washington.
Karen Lynn Dyson, EAC Research director, said there were several
reasons why many states have not made voter registration more
available through public assistance agencies. First, the NVRA was
passed in 1993, and many state and county election officials have
been paying more attention to newer federal election mandates and
transitioning to new voting machines. Moreover, many state welfare
agencies don't see voter registration in their job descriptions --
despite the federal law. The same factors were also cited by
Project Vote's Michael Slater, who emphasized that low-income
people tend to move more often than better-off Americans.
"Our organization exists to correct the problem that voting is
skewed toward upper-income folks," he said. "We are trying to make
voting more representative of the population."
Justice Department spokesperson Cynthia Magnuson cited two
department enforcement actions concerning increased voter
registration; suing New York in 2004 because its state universities
did not "offer voter registration opportunities at those offices
serving students with disabilities," and the department's 2002 suit
against Tennessee, which led to federal oversight of its elections.
The New York suit is still pending.
Scott Novakowski, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a centrist
public policy group based in New York that has followed this issue
for several years, said it was ironic the Justice Department cited
Tennessee because that state's welfare office registrations reveal
how many potential voters could be involved if the department
enforced the law.
"This is not a lot of numbers until you see Tennessee," he said.
"We have looked at how many people can feasibly get on the rolls
and it is enormous. Tennessee is under a court order and is doing
it right. If you look at the number of people who go through public
assistance offices, in some states it is in the millions."
The public interest groups that have tracked this issue -- Demos,
Project Vote, ACORN and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights
Under Law -- have issued reports citing a steady downward trend in
these voter registrations and met with Justice Department officials
in 2005 to present their findings and concerns.
"In January 2005, we had a 10-year report, which documented the 59
percent decline from 1995 through 2004," Novakowski said, adding
follow-up letters cited violations from Arizona, Connecticut,
Florida, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, Pennsylvania
and Tennessee. "John Conyers (now the House Judiciary Committee
chairman) and 29 other representatives asked Attorney General
Alberto Gonzales to look into this, and there was no response."
This spring, after learning of Voting Section letters to North
Carolina and Kentucky pressuring those states to more aggressively
purge their voter lists, the same coalition called on the House and
Senate Judiciary committees to investigate the "selective
enforcement" of voter registration laws.
"We are concerned that the Justice Department's Voting Section is
ignoring the primary purpose of NVRA to "establish procedures that
will increase the number if eligible citizens who register to vote
in elections for federal office."" it wrote in a May 8, 2007,
letter. "Instead, the Voting Section is concentrating its NVRA
enforcement priority on pressuring states to conduct massive purges
of their voter rolls."
Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at Alternet.org and co-author
of What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud
in the 2004 Election, with Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman (The
New Press, 2006).
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