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Voter Registration
By Adam Skaggs – 08/29/08
In 1966, the United States Supreme Court ruled
it was unconstitutional to require voters to pay a $1.50 poll tax to
vote. In 2008, Americans living overseas—including members of the armed forces in Iraq
and Afghanistan—may have to fork over as much as $23.50 if they want to be sure their votes
count in November.
That's how much FedEx will
be charging
some overseas Americans to guarantee their absentee ballots will be delivered
in time to be counted. But while $23.50
might seem like a steep price to pay for casting a ballot, the FedEx service—a joint initiative with the Overseas
Vote Foundation—is actually a step in the right direction. The initiative offers steep discounts on FedEx's
normal rates, and means that Americans living abroad have at least one way to
guarantee their ballots make it back home in time to be counted. That's more than they've had in the past.
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Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Election Day Issues, Voter Registration
By Adam Skaggs – 08/26/08
Having already rejected a proposed rule that would
needlessly disenfranchise eligible voters this November—joining forty-five
states and the District of Columbia in the process—Wisconsin unfortunately
appears to be reconsidering the policy.
Back in July, the state's Government Accountability Board ("GAB") considered
an emergency rule that would have prevented voters from casting regular ballots
if the state didn't find a "complete match" of the voter's information in the
motor vehicle or Social Security database and the voter did not show up at the
polls with acceptable proof of residence.
The GAB rightly rejected the proposal in July, after concluding it
had insufficient data about how well "matching" voter data worked, and how many
voters would be affected.
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Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Voter Lists and Databases, Voter Registration
By Wendy R. Weiser – 08/25/08
*Cross-posted from The Hill
Yesterday the League of Women Voters of Florida, the Florida AFL-CIO, and other non-partisan voter registration groups announced their intent to continue signing up eligible Florida voters for the fall election despite the state’s law restricting voter registration drives. For groups that registered over half a million citizens in Florida in the last presidential race, this is big news.
Just earlier this year, the League and others had declared a moratorium on registering voters as soon as Florida’s new voter registration law went into effect because the law’s strict deadlines, backed by excessive fines, made the risk of conducting drives too prohibitive. States like New Mexico and Texas similarly impose onerous restrictions on voter registration drives, and there too, the laws have shut down or dramatically curtailed voter registration activity.
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Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Voter Registration
By Wendy R. Weiser & Laura Seago – 08/07/08
On July 31st, Senator Dick Durbin and Representatives
Jan Schakowsky and Steven LaTourette and introduced the Student Voter Act
in both chambers of Congress, moving America one step closer to a system that
welcomes eligible young voters into our democratic process.
Young people in general, and students in particular, have
traditionally registered and voted at far lower rates than other citizens. The good news, as CIRCLE and Rock the Vote
report, is that youth voter turnout has steadily increased over the last four election cycles and was more than 100% higher in the 2008 primaries than in previous primary
elections. The bad news, as an upcoming
report by the Brennan
Center notes, is that
there are still significant barriers to student voting, including misleading information about requirements for voter
registration and residency laws that do not accurately reflect the mobility of
young adults in modern society.
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Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Voter Registration
By Adam Skaggs – 08/01/08
You'd think it would be a matter of
common sense that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which is supposed to "
help veterans get the services they have earned," would do everything it could to help veterans vote. Especially since the VA's Patients' Rights rule specifically protects the right of every veteran in the VA's care to
register and vote.
But the VA apparently doesn't agree: on May 5th, the VA issued a
directive that banned voter registration drives from all VA facilities. The VA's explanation was that federal law prohibits partisan political activities by federal employees, but the ban goes far beyond anything that federal law requires. The ban prevents state and local election officials from conducting registration drives in VA facilities, and it also stops non-partisan, non-profit groups like the
League of Women Voters from helping vets sign up to vote.
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Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Voter Registration
By Thaddeus Kromelis – 07/29/08
We don't need more reasons to worry about foreclosure rates.
Digby, nonetheless, citing this AP/CBSnews.com
story, provides one: the high rate of foreclosures in Ohio and the affect election officials
believe it could have on their voting rolls.
(Digby cited the voting issue in the context of a 7/26 longer posting on Hans von
Spakovsky, "legal disenfranchisement" and "voter fraud.") There's concern that a
wave of voters, still registered to their former—foreclosed—address, will
show up to the polls on election day. This could lead to a number of
pre-election challenges or a whole lot of voters casting provisional ballots in
Ohio.
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Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Allegations of Voter Fraud, Election Day Issues, Voter Lists and Databases, Voter Purges and Challenges, Voter Registration
By Justin Levitt – 05/19/08
The Supreme Court's recent
Crawford decision on Indiana's photo ID law was a statement on
evidence (albeit mixed in its
devotion to facts), and not a call to arms. And so far, few states have gotten riled up, preferring instead to spend their little remaining legislative time this session on real solutions to real problems, rather than disenfranchising
elderly nuns.
Political operatives in two states, though, decided that this was an opportune moment to try to tilt the electoral scales for 2008, and pressed legislation creating—not solving—problems for their own citizens.
We've written before on Missouri's firestorm over a proposed constitutional amendment on restrictive photo ID and citizenship rules. At the end of the legislative session, and with the potential to swing the 2008 election on the line (given the history of photo-finish statewide races in Missouri), the amendment died on the vine last Friday after lawmakers ajourned for the year without bringing it to a vote. And then there's the neighbor to the west, which was trying mightily to keep up with the Joneses.
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Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Voter ID, Voter Registration
By Renée Paradis – 04/17/08
The week of April 15 is a nice occasion on which to reflect on deadlines and what people tend to do in the face of deadlines, which, of course, is wait until the last minute before frantically rushing to get that form in on time. This is as true with voter registration as it is with taxes: the single biggest day of the year for voter registration is the deadline before the general election. And, under federal law, states are required to hold that deadline no earlier than 30 days before the election, which leaves elections officials with a deadline of their own: they must somehow process the deluge of forms in order to finalize pollbooks for use on Election Day. The days before deadline are difficult ones for election officials who have to go through mountains of forms while also setting up polling locations, training poll workers, distributing and collecting absentee ballots, testing machines, running early voting, printing ballots. In short, what March and April are to CPAs, October is to elections officials.
Last week, however, an elections worker in Muncie, Indiana got a little too hot under the collar during form-processing season. The Delaware County Election Board called a meeting to figure out how to deal with the flood of new registrations they had received for the presidential primary—including 1,500 on the primary deadline itself, out of a citizen voting age population of only around 90,000. Apparently the 1,500 forms were collected by the Obama campaign, which has made voter registration drives a focus of its efforts with student populations in particular. The Delaware Elections Board was operating at reduced capacity already because, under state law, the Board, which must have the same number of Democratic and Republican employees, is short a Republican—so they're down two whole workers. (Partisan election administration is a blog post for another day.) Will Statom, a Republican board employee, was apparently so angry that this meeting was called without complying with an Indiana public meetings law, he started a fight with a reporter for the Muncie Star-Press, which Statom claimed had "promoted" the "illegal" meeting. Statom shoved Nick Werner into a wall, tried to choke Werner, and then ended up punching Barry Welsh, a candidate for Congress, in the eye when Welsh tried to break up the fight. Statom was charged with misdemeanor battery, but returned to work the next day-the office needed his help to process all those registrations. (He has since been given a three-day suspension).
In 2004, elections officials in swing states also received many more forms than they were expecting—in large part because of the success of voter registration drives that registered a bunch of new voters and pulled more people into the process—something that's already happening this presidential year. Sometimes, those forms simply couldn't be processed in time, and voters had to cast provisional ballots. Other places, voting machines were distributed before all those voters registered, meaning long lines for some on Election Day. Ultimately, though, there was record registration and record turnout levels—something we can all agree is good, right?
Maybe not. Afterwards, some officials responded like Statom—they got angry, or ended up punching the wrong person. States across the country passed restrictions on these drives. Instead of giving counties all the money and capacity they needed to hire as many people as they could to process forms and ensure all voters new and old were able to vote, these dates decided to restrict the inputs—to limit drives' ability to reach new voters. States claim these laws are necessary because groups "hoard" forms—save them till the last minute and then turn them in all at once. But as tax day tells us (and as a study we did in Florida demonstrates), that's what voters do anyway—all groups do is increase the overall number of people who register to vote. Here at the Brennan Center, we've challenged these laws—successfully—as unconstitutional in Ohio and Florida. But they're still on the books in a number of states as we head towards the fall registration season. Rather than giving a black eye to new voters, states should figure out ways to process the form of every American who wants to register and vote.
Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Voter Registration
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