TRENTON, NJ - The Department of the Public Advocate has joined a coalition of voting rights groups to file papers with the State Board of Education today proposing new regulations aimed at ramping up voter registration efforts in New Jersey schools.

Joining with two national nonpartisan advocacy groups, Project Vote and the Fair Elections Legal Network, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey in signing the petition, the Department of the Public Advocate has asked for rules to ensure all New Jersey high schools distribute voter registration forms to eligible seniors and educate them about the fundamental importance of voting. Additionally, the proposal would mandate  that schools report to the state with details about their compliance with the law and the number of students they helped register.

Representational Bias in the 2008 Electorate  reviews the story of who was eligible to vote, who was registered to vote, and who did vote in the 2008 general election. Analyzing the November Voting and Registration supplements of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, the report offers detailed information on registration rates and voting behavior based on key demographic factors, including race/ethnicity, age, gender and marital status, income, education, residential mobility, and disability status. The report also provides registration and turnout rates for each state, with comparative rankings.

By comparing this data with those from other recent elections, the report presents a picture of the growing electorate in the United States, and identifies the changes in the extent to which participation in our federal elections is–and is not–representative of the population that is eligible to vote in America.

To read the full report click here. 

Cleveland, OH--Low-income Ohio citizens will be ensured access to voter registration at Ohio public assistance offices as a result of a settlement agreement submitted to Federal District Court Judge Patricia A. Gaughan over this past holiday weekend. 

The settlement successfully resolves a three-year old lawsuit filed against the Ohio Secretary of State (SOS) and the Director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services (ODJFS) in September 2006 by Lorain resident Carrie Harkless, Cleveland resident Tameca Mardis, and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) charging widespread violations of the federal National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). Section 7 of the NVRA requires public assistance agencies to provide voter registration opportunities to their clients.

Extensive pre-suit investigation and discovery in the case revealed that many of Ohio’s county public assistance offices were ignoring their responsibilities to provide voter registration to their low-income clients.  Currently, only seventy-one percent of low-income Ohioans are registered to vote compared to ninety percent of affluent Ohioans.

Before the lawsuit, there was no state official overseeing the state’s compliance with the federal law.  Although Ohio has designated the Secretary of State as its chief election official responsible for NVRA compliance, at the time the lawsuit was filed, then-Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell contended that the state’s obligation to provide voter registration services to its low-income residents was satisfied by the maintenance of a toll-free hotline for public assistance offices to call. ODJFS claimed that Ohio law prohibited it from ensuring compliance by county offices. 

“As a result of the steps the Secretary of State and ODJFS Director will take, we expect hundreds of thousands of voting-eligible low-income Ohioans to be registered to vote,” said Lisa Danetz, Senior Counsel in the Democracy Program at Demos and co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs.  "We applaud the integration of voter registration into agency processes as well as the planned monitoring of the county public assistance offices."

Today Project Vote is proud to release The NVRA at Fifteen: A Report to Congress, the first comprehensive report evaluating the implementation of this landmark law. Written by voting rights attorney Estelle Rogers, the new report evaluates how four major provisions of the NVRA have—and more importantly haven’t—been successfully implemented: the “motor voter” program, the mail-in registration form, public assistance agency registration, and list maintenance procedures.

As Frances Fox Piven, noted voting rights scholar and activist, explains in her foreword to The NVRA at Fifteen, “the reform of American registration procedures has met widespread resistance, some of it attributable no doubt to bureaucratic inertia, and some of it perhaps politically motivated.” Rogers explains how lack of enforcement, failures of state and federal leadership, and restrictive court decisions have left the full potential of the NVRA unrealized, and have left millions of disenfranchised Americans still awaiting the promise of a truly inclusive democracy.

This new report is also a call for renewed leadership to improve the implementation of the NVRA nationwide, recommending practices that states can adopt to improve their compliance, offering suggestions for legislative changes Congress could enact, and emphasizing the importance of ensuring that the Department of Justice finally commits fully to enforcing the NVRA.

To read this important new report, click here. 

On July 9, Project Vote  and a coalition of voting rights groups filed lawsuits in Indiana and New Mexico, to compel public assistance agencies in those states to provide their clients with the opportunity to register to vote. Today, Project Vote is releasing a new report, Registering Low-Income Voters through Public Assistance Agencies in Missouri, which shows just how well this program can work. 

Missouri went from having one of the worst public agency registration rates in the nation to having one of the best through the work of the Public Agency Voter Registration Project, a coalition of voting rights groups to bring states into compliance with the public agency registration requirements of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). This new case study explains how this success was achieved, from the first surveys to document the poor performance of Missouri public agencies, through the court order that compelled compliance in July 2008, all the way through to last month's successful settlement of the lawsuit.  As a result of this work, public assistance agencies in the state of Missouri went from collecting fewer than 8,000 applications a year to collecting over 100,000 applications in just eight months.

To read this exciting new case study, click here.