A voting rights coalition filed suit today against Georgia state officials to remedy the state’s failure to provide voter registration services at public assistance offices, as required by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.
The lawsuit against Secretary of State Brian Kemp and Commissioner of the Georgia Department of Human Services Clyde L. Reese III was filed on behalf of the Georgia NAACP and the Coalition for the Peoples’ Agenda. The plaintiffs are represented by lawyers from Project Vote, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Demos, the ACLU, the NAACP, and the law firm Dechert LLP.
“The State of Georgia has been ignoring its responsibilities under the NVRA for too many years,” said Nicole Zeitler, director of the Public Agency Voter Registration program at Project Vote. “The result is that thousands of low-income Georgians have been denied the opportunity to register to vote.”
Section 7 of the NVRA requires that all public assistance offices in Georgia distribute a voter registration application each time a client applies for benefits, recertifies, or fills out a change-of-address form. The lawsuit alleges that Georgia has been largely ignoring this mandate for many years, an issue that even the secretary of state has acknowledged, stating that the “DHS did not have consistent NVRA policies.” For example, when the law first took effect in the mid-1990s, the DHS received more than 100,000 voter registration applications, but in 2010, the number of registrations dropped to a mere 4,430.
“We had hoped to remedy the lack of NVRA enforcement without filing a lawsuit, but voting rights are too important to put on hold,” said Laughlin McDonald, Director of the ACLU Voting Rights Project.
The groups ask the court to ensure that defendants take all necessary action to bring the state into compliance with the NVRA, including distribution of voter registration applications, training of public assistance personal on their voter registration duties, and monitoring compliance.
Read more in today’s press release here.