Mr. Bartlett, who has been executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections since 1993, discussed the steps that North Carolina has taken to increase compliance with Section 7 of the NVRA. Mr. Bartlett noted that he initially believed the state’s compliance “was on auto-pilot,” but after the first few years, North Carolina’s compliance with the registration requirements declined.
In response, the state collaborated with organizations, including Project Vote and Demos, to improve the state’s Section 7 compliance in 2006. The result was a 14-point compliance plan that included increasing communication with agency heads within the state government that had voter registration responsibilities; conducting regular voter registration trainings and workshops at agencies; conducting “train the trainer” workshops; and conducting random in-person checks of agencies with mandated voter registration responsibilities (described not as a “gotcha,” but rather a “wellness check”).
According to Mr. Bartlett, the most important aspects of the compliance plan were the increased communication between agencies (including using email to quickly and efficiently ask and answer questions) and the more regular training programs because they significantly reduced the negative impact of employee turnover.
In the first year of implementation (from 2006-2007), voter registration at North Carolina’s public assistance agencies increased by 268 percent. Between 2008 and 2009, the increase was an additional 29 percent. Furthermore, voters from all racial demographics have benefitted from North Carolina’s compliance plan. For example, the voter registration rate of African-Americans at public assistance agencies rose 346 percent between 2006 and 2012, while the registration rate of whites rose 271 percent in the same period. Since 2006, a total of 258,537 voters have been registered through North Carolina’s agency-based voter registration programs.
Mr. Bartlett noted that the primary focus for the State Board of Elections (SBE) in coordinating compliance with Section 7 has been to “create a partnership atmosphere [between the SBE, individual local agencies and their state umbrella agency, and the County Board of Elections] wherein multiple entities share responsibility for Section 7 compliance.”
Mr. Bartlett discussed several other improvements that have led to increased compliance with Section 7, notably the development of an online preference form system, which allows agencies to electronically record whether a client wishes to register to vote. This tool saves money by reducing the need to print paper-based forms, and also provides real-time reporting for SBE staff to use in monitoring agency compliance.
Finally, the Commission received testimony from Lisa Danetz, Senior Counsel at Demos, which “seeks an America where everyone has an equal say in our democracy.” Project Vote and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law are partners with Demos in this work and have been involved in all the litigation work described by Ms. Dantez.
Ms. Danetz noted that the submission of voter registration forms at public assistance agencies across the country declined by 80 percent from 1996 to 2006. In response to this decline, Demos and its partners—including Project Vote—conducted investigations in states across the country. These investigations revealed several issues with agency-based voter registration, such as agencies that conducted inadequate staff training and local offices that did not have voter registration applications on site. As a direct result of these investigations, Demos and its partners have worked cooperatively with eleven states to achieve compliance, successfully sued an additional six states (Ohio, Missouri, New Mexico, Indiana, Georgia, and Pennsylvania), and are currently in pending litigation with another three states (Louisiana, Massachusetts, and Nevada).
The resulting settlement agreements have included strong monitoring, reporting, training and oversight provisions (many of which are similar to North Carolina’s successful implementation plan). Since these public interest organizations have begun their Section 7 compliance work, almost two million more low-income citizens have registered to vote at public assistance offices than would otherwise be expected to register in those states. Moreover, of the 10 states that collected the most voter registration applications at public assistance agencies in 2009-2010, seven of them had previously had some compliance intervention from either the Department of Justice or public interest groups. (Data from 2011-2012 will not be available until June 2013.)
In response to criticism by Mr. Torchinsky that the increase in voter registration at public assistance agencies in recent years has been caused not by the efforts of Demos and its partners, but by the economy and resulting increase in caseload at these agencies, Ms. Danetz noted that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program caseload was higher in 2005-2006 than in 1995-1996, yet the number of voter registrations was significantly higher in 1995-1996. Ms. Danetz also addressed concerns raised by Mr. Torchinksy that NVRA issues should be settled out of court in a cooperative manner by noting that Demos and their partners have worked cooperatively with eleven states to address issues with agency-based voter registration.
Furthermore, in states where litigation has completed, three-to-four year settlement agreements have been reached between the parties. Ms. Danetz also noted that, according to Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Thomas E. Perez, 4,171 voter registration applications were submitted in the first four months of the Rhode Island agreement compared to just 457 in the entire two-year period prior to the litigation.
The Commission will accept comments from the public until close of business on May 19th. Comments may be submitted by e-mail at publiccomments – at – usccr.gov or mailed to the USCCR Office of General Counsel at 1331 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, Suite 1150, Washington DC 20425.
Corey Peterson is a second-year law student at American University’s Washington College of Law. She joins Project Vote as legal intern for spring 2013.