MELINDA DESLATTE, ASSOCIATED PRESS
BATON ROUGE, La. — A voting rights group said Wednesday that thousands of low-income Louisiana residents have registered to vote because of its pressure on state public assistance agencies to provide the applications.
Nonprofit organization Project Vote, which advocates on behalf of low-income, minority and youth voters, said that 29,233 people applied to vote in 2011 and 2012 through sites that offer registration for food stamps, Medicaid and other services.
That’s up from 6,037 applications in 2009 and 2010, according to state data provided to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
The group credits a successful federal lawsuit against state agencies for the increase.
“These data show that Louisianans want to register and will register to vote when given the opportunity,” Sarah Brannon, director of Project Vote’s public agency voter registration program said in a statement.
However, of the 29,000 applications, about 11,000 new voters were registered, while the rest were largely address and party changes, said Meg Casper, spokeswoman for Secretary of State Tom Schedler.
“I’m not sure they can directly correlate increases in voter registration to the case, but we’re certainly happy when voter registration increases, no matter how it increases,” Casper said.
The new voters signed up at the public assistance sites represent about 3 percent of the nearly 376,000 registrations during the reporting period, according to data from Schedler’s office.
Louisiana has 2.9 million registered voters.
Project Vote and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund filed a lawsuit in 2011 against Schedler’s office, the Department of Children and Family Services and the Department of Health and Hospitals.
The lawsuit — filed on behalf of the Louisiana State Conference of the NAACP — accused the state agencies of noncompliance with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, saying they routinely failed to provide required voter registration services to people applying for or renewing public assistance benefits.
A federal judge agreed, ruling in 2012 that the agencies needed to provide the voter registration forms to all applicants for public assistance, including applicants seeking those benefits online or by mail or phone.
Schedler’s office is appealing the ruling, questioning its oversight authority over the other state agencies. READ MORE