Yesterday, voting rights groups filed suit against the Secretary of the Commonwealth and the Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance for violating their federally mandated responsibilities to offer tens of thousands of public assistance clients the opportunity to register to vote.
Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act of 1995 to boost democratic participation by ensuring that all eligible citizens have ample opportunities to register to vote. Section 7 of the law requires state agencies provide public assistance—including agencies that administer food stamps, Medicaid, TANF, and WIC— to assist their clients in registering to vote.
In Massachusetts, voter registration applications submitted through public assistance offices had declined by as much as 92.5 percent between 1999-2000 and 2009-2010. According to the suit, the decline in voter registration at public assistance offices has contributed to a significant voter registration gap between low-income and affluent citizens in the Commonwealth; in the last presidential election year, this gap was 28 percent.
Among the plaintiffs in the case is Bethzaida Delgado, a DTA client who is eligible to vote but was not offered the opportunity to register in her interactions with DTA offices over several years. Other plaintiffs include civil rights group, NAACP New England Area Conference (NAACP-NEAC), and community organizing group, New England United for Justice (NEU4J). Both groups help low-income citizens register to vote in their communities.
The plaintiffs are represented by voting rights groups Project Vote, Demos, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice, as well as the law firm of Ropes & Gray LLP. Defendants named in the suit are Massachusetts Secretary of State William F. Galvin and officials from the Executive Office of Health and Human Services and the DTA.
“We’re tired of picking up the slack when the state fails our most vulnerable citizens,“ said Juan Cofield, president of the New England Area Conference of the NAACP. “So, after years of neglect we decided to sue.”
“In failing to comply with the NVRA, Massachusetts has significantly limited low-income citizens’ opportunities to register to vote. This ultimately threatens the integrity of our democracy not just in the Commonwealth, but nationwide,” said Sarah Brannon, director of the Public Agency Registration Program at Project Vote.
Massachusetts’ NVRA violations are part of a national pattern of states failing to meet public agency registration obligations. Between 1995-1996 and 2005-2006, voter registrations at public assistance agencies had declined nationwide by 80 percent. Since 2006, interventions like yesterday’s lawsuit have helped reverse the negative trend.
“As we experience a national wave of attempts to keep low-income citizens off the rolls and out of the voting booth, we simply cannot accept any state’s failure to meet its responsibilities,” said Robert Kengle, co-director of the Voting Rights Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. READ MORE.