Election Law Clearinghouse

Project Vote is one of the country’s leading nonpartisan voter registration and voter education organizations. Yet our work is made meaningless if state laws, rules and procedures do not afford low-income and minority Americans an equal opportunity to participate in the democratic process.

Despite significant progress in the last fifty years towards fulfilling the promise of the First, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, including the passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1963, the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1995 and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, Americans from historically disadvantaged communities still encounter barriers registering to vote and voting. In the past few years, even organizations working to increase participation among low-income and minority voters have encountered barriers as new state laws restrict their effectiveness.

While Project Vote rarely engages in litigation itself, either as plaintiff or counsel, we do work to uncover barriers to political participation at the state and local level that require legal action. More importantly, we then identify affected individuals and organizations and bring them together with nonprofit or private legal representation. Project Vote provides both parties, plaintiffs and lawyers, with technical assistance aimed at bringing prompt and successful claims.

In the past decade, we have focused on enforcing the NVRA, specifically provisions requiring states to offer voter registration to public assistance recipients. In fact, Project Vote helped bring some of the first cases that decided the constitutionality of the Act. Recently, we also have begun to take steps to challenge a range of voter suppression laws enacted in the past two years, including several severally restricting the ability of organizations to help minority Americans register to vote.

There have been a number of successes and there will soon be new challenges. Project Vote intends to use this Election Law Clearinghouse as a website where organizations who are challenging or are interested in challenging laws and regulations suppressing voter participation can find current pleadings, court decisions and settlements related to this issue.

Contact Brian Mellor, Senior Election Counsel, for more information.