February 16, 2010 - NORFOLK, VA - Today, leading voter protection groups Advancement Project and Project Vote, along with pro bono cooperating attorneys from the law firm of Ropes & Gray LLP, filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Norfolk against Elisa Long, general registrar of Norfolk and Nancy Rodrigues, secretary of the State Board of Elections, for denying access to certain voter registration records.  After receiving reports from their local community partners regarding large numbers of rejected voter registration applications, particularly from students at the historically African-American Norfolk State University, Advancement Project and Project Vote sought to review Norfolk’s rejected registration applications to ascertain if qualified persons were unlawfully kept off the voting rolls.

February 16, 2010 - WASHINGTON, D.C. - In response to concerns expressed by national voting rights groups Project Vote and the Fair Elections Legal Network (FELN), the Kansas Secretary of State has issued new instructions to county election officials to ensure that eligible voters are not wrongfully removed from the rolls under an ongoing program to update voter registration databases based on interstate matching.

Kansas has partnered with 11 other states – Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and South Dakota – to run an annual comparison of statewide voter databases to see if voters have moved and re-registered in another state.  The new instructions being hailed by voting rights groups clarify how local Kansas election officials should handle potential voter matches sent to them by the Secretary of State based on these interstate crosschecks. 

TRENTON, NJ - The Department of the Public Advocate has joined a coalition of voting rights groups to file papers with the State Board of Education today proposing new regulations aimed at ramping up voter registration efforts in New Jersey schools.

Joining with two national nonpartisan advocacy groups, Project Vote and the Fair Elections Legal Network, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey in signing the petition, the Department of the Public Advocate has asked for rules to ensure all New Jersey high schools distribute voter registration forms to eligible seniors and educate them about the fundamental importance of voting. Additionally, the proposal would mandate  that schools report to the state with details about their compliance with the law and the number of students they helped register.

Representational Bias in the 2008 Electorate  reviews the story of who was eligible to vote, who was registered to vote, and who did vote in the 2008 general election. Analyzing the November Voting and Registration supplements of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, the report offers detailed information on registration rates and voting behavior based on key demographic factors, including race/ethnicity, age, gender and marital status, income, education, residential mobility, and disability status. The report also provides registration and turnout rates for each state, with comparative rankings.

By comparing this data with those from other recent elections, the report presents a picture of the growing electorate in the United States, and identifies the changes in the extent to which participation in our federal elections is–and is not–representative of the population that is eligible to vote in America.

To read the full report click here. 

Cleveland, OH--Low-income Ohio citizens will be ensured access to voter registration at Ohio public assistance offices as a result of a settlement agreement submitted to Federal District Court Judge Patricia A. Gaughan over this past holiday weekend. 

The settlement successfully resolves a three-year old lawsuit filed against the Ohio Secretary of State (SOS) and the Director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services (ODJFS) in September 2006 by Lorain resident Carrie Harkless, Cleveland resident Tameca Mardis, and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) charging widespread violations of the federal National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). Section 7 of the NVRA requires public assistance agencies to provide voter registration opportunities to their clients.

Extensive pre-suit investigation and discovery in the case revealed that many of Ohio’s county public assistance offices were ignoring their responsibilities to provide voter registration to their low-income clients.  Currently, only seventy-one percent of low-income Ohioans are registered to vote compared to ninety percent of affluent Ohioans.

Before the lawsuit, there was no state official overseeing the state’s compliance with the federal law.  Although Ohio has designated the Secretary of State as its chief election official responsible for NVRA compliance, at the time the lawsuit was filed, then-Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell contended that the state’s obligation to provide voter registration services to its low-income residents was satisfied by the maintenance of a toll-free hotline for public assistance offices to call. ODJFS claimed that Ohio law prohibited it from ensuring compliance by county offices. 

“As a result of the steps the Secretary of State and ODJFS Director will take, we expect hundreds of thousands of voting-eligible low-income Ohioans to be registered to vote,” said Lisa Danetz, Senior Counsel in the Democracy Program at Demos and co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs.  "We applaud the integration of voter registration into agency processes as well as the planned monitoring of the county public assistance offices."