Are Voter Registration Drives Being Put Out of Business?
Are Voter Registration Drives Being Put Out of Business?
By Steven Rosenfeld
AlterNet
Wednesday 25 July 2007
After the wave of successes in 2004 voter registration drives by
groups like ACORN, a half-dozen states passed severe laws that scared off
voting activists - and now the Senate is weighing in.
In 2004, Floridians overwhelmingly voted to raise their state minimum
wage after low-income advocates collected ballot petition signatures,
registered thousands of new voters and turned out the vote. The following
spring, Florida’s Republican-majority Legislature reacted. It passed a law
that so severely regulated voter registration drives that before the 2006
primary, Florida’s League of Women Voters stopped registering voters for
the first time in its history. The League feared mistakes on just 14 voter
registration forms could result in penalties equal to its entire $70,000
budget.
Florida’s actions were not unique. In Ohio, where the 2004
presidential election lingered as its Electoral College votes were
challenged in Congress, Ohio’s Republican-majority Legislature passed a
series of election reforms including tough new rules and penalties for
voter registration drives. In 2006, that law stopped the Association of
Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, and community and church
groups from registering voters in the state.
“In Florida, it absolutely shut down voter registration by all groups
going up through the primary election of 2006,” said Wendy Weiser, Deputy
Director of the Brennan Center, a New York-based public-interest law firm
that challenged the Florida and Ohio laws. “In Ohio, before there was an
injunction in the case, voter registration was halted.”
Both Florida’s and Ohio’s voter registration laws were challenged in
court and were enjoined, or suspended, before the 2006 election allowing
voter registration to resume. Federal judges found they violated First
Amendment rights and were hurting efforts to sign up new voters. But the
trend of regulating voter registration drives did not end there. Between
the 2004 election and today, six other states adopted similar laws -
Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, New Mexico, Missouri and Washington - and
like-minded bills have been proposed in New Jersey, Arizona and elsewhere,
according to the Brennan Center.
Not all of these laws were passed by Republican partisans seeking
political revenge. But the line between ensuring an accurate registration
process and intentionally suppressing voters is very thin, according to
academics, opponents and supporters of these laws. On Wednesday, July 23,
the Senate Rules Committee will hold a hearing on sections of an election
reform bill (The Ballot Integrity Act of 2007 or S. 1487) that would ban
states from passing laws that would negatively impact voter registration
drives.
“I think it is a real serious concern,” said Dan Tokaji, Assistant
Professor of Law at Ohio State University and an election law expert.
“There are constitutional rights, free speech rights and petition rights at
issue. What has a lot of voting rights activists concerned is states with
GOP-dominated legislatures are going to put a lot of voter registration
groups out of business.”
American democracy depends on private groups more than the government
to register voters. As a result, registration efforts have always been
sources of political friction.
“The attempts to restrict registration and attempts to smear groups
that attempt to register voters comes from people who don’t think those
voters are likely to support them,” said Kevin Whelan, ACORN communications
director. “I think there is another response to people who don’t like to
see a lot of minority voters coming onto the rolls. They could campaign for
those votes.”
“It was done to address real needs,” said William Todd, president of
the Ohio chapter of the Republican National Lawyers Association, speaking
of his state’s voter registration reforms that were since found to be
unconstitutional. “Ohio was not alone in not having an updated election
code. People hadn’t looked at some of those laws in 50 years.”
“There were two stories that stuck in my mind,” he said, recalling
lobbying for the laws. “Certainly there were a handful of fraudulent
registrations here and there. The other thing was the state organization of
election officials was complaining that there were certain groups that
would save registration cards of months and then dump them on the boards of
election at the last minute. Because they were brought in in such an untidy
manner, the boards couldn’t verify them and process them and people lost
the opportunity to vote.”
ACORN’s voter registration efforts have been criticized in more severe
tones by the GOP and their allies - especially in the heat of a close
election. Between 2005 and 2006, the group registered 1.6 million voters in
23 states, Whelan said. In Ohio in 2005, ACORN and other voter registration
groups working in Ohio were sued by “The Free Enterprise Coalition,” a
GOP-funded group that promoted voter fraud concerns and disappeared after
litigation began, causing the suit to be dismissed. However, in other
states some problems were found with some of ACORN’s voter registration
forms, although the politics surrounding the most high-profile example is
murky at best.
In Kansas City, Missouri, four ACORN temporary workers were indicted
on felony charges of falsifying seven voter registration forms just days
before the 2006 midterm election. ACORN had alerted state authorities and
had been cooperating with the FBI, Whelan said, but the interim U.S.
Attorney, Bradley Schlozman, went against established Justice Department
procedure and announced the indictments. While the ACORN workers later
pleaded guilty, Whelan said the number of voter registrations affected was
“less than a fraction of a fraction of one percent” of all its
registrations nationwide. Still, that did not stop the Republican Party
from accusing Democrats of trying to steal the election, the very political
meddling the Justice Department policy was intended to prevent.
Republicans, for their part, also had problems with submitting
fraudulent voter registrations. In late October 2006, just before Election
Day, 11 volunteers working for the Republican Party of Orange County,
California, were charged with registration fraud after they submitted
registration forms where Democratic voters were misidentified up as members
of the Republican Party. And in Nevada, a firm that the Republican National
Committee hired to register voters, Voters Outreach of America, was found
to be throwing out registrations for Democrats while turning in forms for
Republicans.
But election law experts say problems like these, whether in Kansas
City, Orange County or Las Vegas are by far the exception - not the rule.
Moreover, they say new state laws passed since 2004 that have already
impeded hundreds of thousands of voters from registering are a much bigger
concern and of an entirely different magnitude.
“The numbers are enormous,” said the Brennan Center’s Wendy Wieser,
speaking of the voter registration restrictions that were in effect in
Florida and Ohio in 2006. “But they weren’t as effective as they were
intended to be. They were thrown out. They were effective when they were in
place.”
“They got into a huge fight in Ohio on whether the regulations were
onerous and punitive,” the Republican National Lawyers Association’s Todd
said. “But if you register a person to vote, you have an obligation to turn
the registration in, and make sure they are registered and can vote.”
Ohio State’s Dan Tokaji said the Senate Rule Committee’s hearing was
timely, because both political parties are now jockeying for position
before the next presidential election.
“It is a perfect time to be talking about this,” he said. “I expect
there would be all kinds of efforts by other states and GOP-dominated
legislatures to regulate voter registration between now and 2008.”
———-
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).