Project Vote, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Inc. (LDF), and New Orleans attorney Ronald Wilson have filed a complaint in federal court to enforce the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and ensure that low-income residents of Louisiana have the opportunity to register to vote. The complaint was filed on behalf of the Louisiana State Conference of the NAACP and Louisiana residents and public assistance clients Roy Ferrand and Luther Scott, Jr. Read the press release on the lawsuit here.
The suit—which names Louisiana Secretary of State Tom Schedler, as well as the secretaries of the Department of Children and Family Services and the Department of Health and Hospitals as defendants—cites evidence that Louisiana public agencies have been failing to offer voter registration services as required by the NVRA.
Louisiana now joins other states where Project Vote and our partners have been forced to bring lawsuits to ensure compliance with the NVRA, and we expect the same successful outcome. Cases we fought in Missouri and Ohio (in partnership with Demos and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law) were successfully settled, and resulted in skyrocketing voter registration numbers in both states, with hundreds of thousands of public assistance clients taking the opportunity to register. (Read a case study on our success in Missouri here.)
Our results in these and other states show that public agency registration works, when it is properly implemented, and is a vital means of reaching underrepresented Americans. We look forward to proving it again in Louisiana.