MIKE HASTEN, THE MONROE NEWS STAR
BATON ROUGE — As registrars of voters across the state prepare activities for Voter Registration Week next month, the NAACP and Project Vote, a nonprofit organization, are celebrating a rise in voter registration they say is due to a court ruling against state officials.
Project Vote says filing and winning a lawsuit accusing state agencies of not following the National Voter Registration Act resulted in 29,233 voter registration forms being filed over a two-year period. The nonprofit organization says after the suit was filed in 2011 and a subsequent ruling in 2012, the number of applications filed through state agencies “represents a dramatic increase of 384 percent over the previous two-year period.”
The lawsuit named as defendants Secretary of State Tom Schedler, Department of Children and Family Services Secretary Ruth Johnson and Department of Health and Hospitals Secretary Bruce Greenstein, who no longer holds that office. Kathy Kliebert is the current DHH secretary.
It says DHH and DCFS employees were not abiding by the federal law, which requires the agencies to offer voter registration to every person who comes in, calls on the phone or emails an agency seeking assistance.
A federal judge earlier this year ruled that Schedler, as the state’s top election official, is responsible for seeing that the agencies comply with the law.
Schedler has filed an appeal pointing out that he has no authority over other state agencies and that while he is elected, the governor appoints the heads of those agencies.
Voter registration in Louisiana is second highest in the nation, with 84 percent of eligible voters signed up. Schedler said it’s great to have high registration numbers but he wishes that more of those registered voters would actually vote.
Turnout for the 2012 presidential election was high — 67 percent — but less than 36 percent of voters bothered to go to the polls in 2011 when Gov. Bobby Jindal ran for re-election. Turnout in some local elections has been much lower.
Meg Casper, press secretary for Schedler’s office, said registration numbers are up and “we’re happy when voter registration numbers go up, no matter how we get them.”
But Casper points out that the 29,233 forms mentioned by Project Vote weren’t actually registrations. More than a third — 10,918 — were new voters, but 436 were duplicate forms for people already registered or who had already filed applications, 987 were rejected applicants who either were not eligible to vote, their addresses could not be confirmed or their applications were incomplete, and the remainder (16,892) was changes in registration, such as name, address or party affiliation.
“It’s still characterized as a success,” said Sarah Massey of Project Vote. “Every time you move, change your name or party registration, you need to update.”
An investigation by the plaintiffs showed that when the law was first put into place, nearly 75,000 citizens registered at Louisiana’s public agencies in the first two years, 1995 and 1996. But over the next 13 years, the number of new registrations from those offices dropped 88 percent, the lawsuit said.
The problem, Massey said, is that the agencies stopped fully implementing the law. She said that changed after the lawsuit.
The law states that agencies must “offer meaningful opportunity to register.”
“Having a stack of papers on a counter or having a check box on a form is not sufficient,” she said. They should be asking. It looks like that’s happening now.”
Representatives of DHH and DCFS sidestepped question about whether the agencies advised employees to step up compliance. They referred all questions to the secretary of state’s office and Casper said there’s no way for her to know what the agencies did.
The NVRA is commonly referred to as the “Motor Voter Act” because it originally was aimed at motor vehicle offices.
Becky Davis of the Louisiana Office of Motor Vehicles, which was not mentioned in the lawsuit, said “It’s a requirement that we ask if everyone wants to register to vote. So, we do ask.”
Voter registration numbers, historically, have been relatively constant —about 2.9 million.
But every four years, when there’s a presidential election like in 2012, the number jumps.
In 2008, when President Barack Obama first ran for office, 106,658 new registrants joined Louisiana’s elector pool between January and December. That raised the number of voters from 2.837 million to 2.944 million but it dropped in 2011 back to 2.85 million.
With Obama running for re-election in 2012, one of the years counted by Project Vote and the NAACP as showing improved compliance with the NVRA, the number of new voter registrations jumped 106,643. That was almost identical to the 2008 increase and brought the number up to 2.967 million – a record.
Current registration figures show Louisiana has just under 2.92 million registered voters.
Voter Registration Week in Louisiana is Aug. 26-30. Registrars are hosting events.
Schedler cautions prospective registrants against going to a table set up to sign up new voters unless there’s proof that it’s a legitimate registration drive. He warns that it would be an easy way to steal identities with all the personal identification on forms. READ MORE