With Voting Rights Groups Reeling, New Registrations
Decline
Fears of Voter Fraud Weaken Registration Efforts
By Jesse Zwick
10/15/10
http://washingtonindependent.com/100775/with-voting-rights-groups-reeling-new-registrations-decline

After more than a decade of success expanding voter
rolls, voting rights advocates are noting a disturbing
trend in the run-up to the 2010 elections. Dramatically
fewer groups are engaged in registering voters during
the current election cycle than in previous midterm
elections, and fewer voters, especially in poorer areas
that are traditionally underrepresented and therefore
the usual target of voter registration drives, are
registering to vote as a result.

Registration patterns vary significantly from state to
state, but 26.7 percent fewer new voters have registered
in Florida this year than in 2006, along with 21.4
percent fewer in Maryland and 16.9 percent fewer in
Tennessee, according to the Brennan Center for Justice,
a public policy and law institute at New York
University. And while there's no single cause for the
decline, experts point out that many independent
organizations are withering under a combination of
public attacks by conservative activists alleging voter
fraud and new state laws making it difficult for such
groups to operate.

"A four-year wave of attacks on voter registration
drives, both in terms of state laws that either shut
down voter registration drives or made it too onerous to
do it, and other public attacks have certainly had an
effect," said Wendy Weiser, director of the Brennan
Center's Voting Rights and Elections Project.

And while voter registration drives have languished,
state governments aren't picking up the slack. Voting
rights advocates argue that many states aren't
adequately complying with requirements in the National
Voter Registration Act of 1993 to register voters
automatically at state agencies and keep their addresses
up to date when they move. The result is a gaping hole
in the country's voter registration efforts that
threatens to undo the positive strides that have been
made over the last decade and a half.

The most obvious cause for the decline in voter
registration is the shuttering of the Association of
Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN. At its
height, ACORN had a budget of close to $35 million and
was credited with registering approximately half a
million voters in 2008 alone. Amid allegations from
conservative activists that the group engaged in
widespread voter fraud, Congress voted last fall to
defund ACORN, which received approximately a third of
its budget in the form of government grants. The rest of
the group's funding soon dried up, and ACORN was forced
to cease operations at its approximately 75 field
offices soon thereafter.

But rather than rest on the laurels of their victory
against ACORN, conservative activists have been
emboldened to seek out new organizations engaging in
voter registration drives and levy similar accusations
against them, creating an increasingly hostile landscape
for them to perform their mission.

"I wouldn't underestimate the public attacks," says
Weiser. "It's not a law prohibiting you, so it's a
little harder to demonstrate, but the chilling effects
have nonetheless been palpable. People are nervous to do
drives and support groups that do this kind of work."

Tea Party groups, revved up by accusations made against
ACORN in 2008, have worked to challenge voter
registration drives and contest votes on election day in
a number of states, including California, Wisconsin and
New Mexico. But the clearest example of attacks launched
against new groups seeking to register voters occurred
in Harris County, Texas, where True The Vote, which is
affiliated with the Tea Party group the King Street
Patriots, dug through the county's registrations and
accused a voter registration organization called Houston
Votes of engaging in widespread voter fraud in August.

The controversy centered on a number of voter
registration forms filed by Houston Votes that were
rejected because they were linked to vacant lots and
people that did not exist. Many of these registrations,
Houston Votes argues, had been made in 2008 and 2009 -
before the group was founded and when many of the lots
still had homes on them. But the damage had been done.
King Street Patriots' leader Catherine Engelbrecht
allegedly referred to Houston Votes as the "New Black
Panthers' office"; Houston Votes responded by filing
suit for defamation.

"When someone says you're associated with racists that
are trying to kill all white people, then it has a
chilling effect on donors willing to give to your
organization, which has an effect on the amount of work
you can do. That's pretty simple-minded stuff," said Jim
George, the lawyer representing Houston Votes. In recent
months, the group has been forced to slow its activities
to registering just 200 votes a day, down from over a
1,000 before the allegations were leveled.

But Tea Party groups pose only part of the problem for
organizations hoping to launch voter registration
efforts. While the National Voter Registration Act of
1993 requires states to make blank mail-in voter
registration forms available to organized voter
registration programs, many state legislatures,
especially since the fear of widespread voter fraud
began to rise among conservatives in 2004, have
countered with various laws that place burdens on groups
hoping to carry out that function.

These new laws, detailed in a report by the Brennan
Center, range from enacting stricter-than-usual
reporting and filing deadlines for voter registration
groups to shifting the cost of providing registration
forms onto the groups themselves. In addition, many
states have imposed stiff civil and criminal penalties
on groups whose members are late or fail to comply with
reporting, making engagement in the process overly
burdensome or risky for small organizations.

The Republican-controlled state legislature in Florida,
for instance, enacted a law so onerous that its
constitutionality was successfully challenged in court
in 2006 by the League of Women Voters of Florida. The
legislature passed a new law in response, however, which
a number of groups in Florida point to as the reason why
registration efforts in their state are down more than
26 percent from 2006.

"The direct reason this year in particular is because of
new legislation signed into law by the Republican state
legislature that puts as many obstacles in place as
possible as far as third parties hoping to register
people to vote," says Ron Mills, an area leader for the
Broward County Democratic Party. "There are all these
obstacles and reporting you have to do as if you are a
campaign, even though you are a volunteer organization
with few professional staff. . It's got to where even
the local Democratic executive committee in Broward
County decided they didn't want to go through the
trouble, so we're not qualified to register voters."

New voter identification laws, too, are placing burdens
on citizens' ability to register to vote. Arizona, for
instance, requires people to supply proof of citizenship
to register to vote, and from 2004 to 2008, according to
a report from Demos, the liberal public policy research
organization, over 38,000 registrations were rejected as
a result - despite court documents that indicated 90
percent were from residents born in the United States.

And the states, the Demos report also notes, are not
filling in where outside voter drive efforts have fallen
off. Many of them are failing to comply with the
provisions in the NVRA that require them to keep up with
voters' address changes, which represent approximately a
third of all registration activities in a given election
cycle.

"If people move - and every four-year cycle it's
approximately 40 percent of the population in total who
do so (and it's more with poor populations) - one of the
things that we found doing an investigation about states
not complying with NVRA obligations is that they're not
updating registration addresses," said the Brennan
Center's Weiser. "There was a huge increase in
registration in 2008, and we worry with all the
foreclosures and moving that a lot of folks on the voter
rolls won't be accurately reflected and might face
problems when they try to vote."

In the long run, a top-notch state voter registration
system that complies with the NVRA and automates
registration at public assistance agencies, schools and
DMVs should be responsible for voter registration. In
the meantime, said Weiser, "voter registration drives
are the activities that fill that gap so they certainly
perform a really needed function. Right now, there's a
very big hole out there."

_____________________________________________

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