By Nathan Henderson-James and cross-posted at Project Vote's blog, Voting Matters.
A Sunday news story by Catherine Dolinsky in the Tampa Tribune highlights Florida’s failure to comply with the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and talks extensively about the joint efforts of Project Vote, Demos, and ACORN to force Florida to follow this federal law. Dolinksy quotes ACORN’s Florida Head Organizer Brian Kettering on the civil rights implications of Florida’s failure,
"Hispanic and African-American communities are being deprived of the opportunity to register to vote at a higher rate than anybody else," Kettenring said. "So this is a fairness issue, but it's also a civil rights issue."
Dolinksy also talked with Moritz College of Law Professor Dan Tokaji, who blogs at Equal Vote.
"The 1993 federal law requires a variety of state offices to provide voting registration assistance - most notably, departments of motor vehicles. Congress included public assistance agencies in the mix to ensure that low-income people who don't drive are also included, said Daniel Tokaji, a law professor at Ohio State University and expert on voting rights.
"This is the group where we need the most work, because it is the group least likely to participate in elections," Tokaji said. "The biggest problem with our democracy is that we don't have a representative electorate; people who are elected are not representative of the citizenry as a whole."
Project Vote, Demo, and ACORN have informed Florida of a potential lawsuit based on its failure to comply with the NVRA.
"According to Florida Division of Elections data, public assistance agencies turned in 9 percent of voter registrations received in 1995. By 2007, they were contributing 1.8 percent. By 2007, agency registrations had dropped from 120,886 to 10,470.
Meanwhile, enrollment in Florida's assistance programs has remained relatively steady.
According to the Department of Children & Families, the average number of poor Floridians receiving cash assistance fell from 569,158 in 1995-96 to just 76,986 in 2007-08, reflecting the tightened welfare requirements that Congress passed in 1996. Average monthly participation in the food stamps program declined by about 45,000 over the same period to just under 1.4 million.
But those declines are nearly offset by Florida's Medicaid enrollment increase alone. The average monthly number of Medicaid beneficiaries grew from 1.2 million in 1995-96 to more than 1.7 million in 2007-08, DCF data indicate. Participation in WIC, a subsidized nutrition program for low-income women, infants and children, rose from 332,135 in 1995-96 to 420,514 in 2006-07."
This work is part of Project Vote’s on-going NVRA Implementation Project, which targets states with high enrollment rates in public assistance programs and relatively large populations from Project Vote’s constituency groups which are low-income voters, voters of color, and New American voters. The project, carried out in conjunction with ACORN and Demos, has filed a similar complaint in Arizona and is suing in Ohio and Missouri.
Ultimately, as Professor Tokaji notes, a healthy democracy demands participation of all its citizens and the electorate must represent the citizenry. The NVRA is one of the best tools for bringing the electorate in alignment with the citizenry and it is incumbent upon the states to do everything they can to comply with the law.