The rise in voter registrations coming from public-assistance agencies points to increased compliance with a 1993 federal election law.
David Rosenfeld at Miller-McCune writes on rising registrations under the National Voter Registration Act or “Motor Voter” law:
“‘There are reasons why the wealthiest 1 percent of our population owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent, and why the gap between the rich and the poor grows wider,’ Rep. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who is now a senator said at the time of the bill’s passage in the House. ‘And one of the reasons as to why we see these occurrences is that, to a very large degree, poor people and working people have very little impact on our nation’s political process. Wealthy people vote in large numbers and elect the candidates of their choice; poor and working people do not. Mr. Speaker, that motor-voter bill, simply stated, will make it easier for poor and working people to register to vote and to participate in the political process.’
Almost 20 years later, the fight to enforce the NVRA at public assistance offices has been the subject of intense legal pressure by activist groups over the past six years. In many of the states that saw an increase in recent years, nonprofit groups led by Dēmos, Project Vote, and The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law had either sued or threatened to sue the state.
Ohio topped the list of eight states that had improved with legal pressure, along with Missouri, Tennessee, Colorado, New York, and North Carolina. States at the bottom of the list, which received the fewest voter-registration applications from public-assistance offices as a percentage of overall voters, include Georgia, New Jersey, and Texas.”
“If you just look at the numbers, it’s pretty obvious where the problems are,” said Project Vote’s Public Agency Registration Project director, Nicole Kovite Zeitler. “We hope that the rest of the states that have fallen short will recognize they don’t have to wait to be sued over this. It’s a law that’s been on the books since 1993 and they just need to do it.”
Learn more about our Public Agency Registration Project here and here.