In
ruling, Judge says that state officials must revise their procedures for offering
the state’s public assistance clients the opportunity to register to vote
ALBUQUERQUE, NM – A
coalition of voting rights groups scored a major victory yesterday in their
lawsuit against New Mexico’s Human Services Division (HSD) and Secretary of
State Mary Herrera, with a ruling by a U.S. District Judge that the State of
New Mexico is in violation of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).
Citing clear evidence that New
Mexico public assistance offices are violating their federally mandated
responsibility to offer tens of thousands of New Mexicans each year the
opportunity to register to vote, a coalition of voting rights groups filed suit
last year against HSD and the state’s chief election official, Secretary of
State Herrera. The plaintiff is represented by voting rights groups Project
Vote, Dēmos, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (Lawyers’ Committee),
as well as by the law firms of Freedman Boyd Hollander Goldberg & Ives and DLA
Piper U.S.
Section 7 of the NVRA
requires that public assistance agencies give clients a voter registration
application with every application for benefits, recertification, and change of
address. New Mexico policy,
however, has been to give voter registration application forms to only those clients
who explicitly request them, a practice that plaintiff maintains is in
violation of the NVRA.
Yesterday, United States
District Judge Judith Herrera agreed, granting the plaintiff’s motion for
partial summary judgment and denying motions from both HSD and the Secretary of
State. The court held that “Section 7 does not make the provision of a
voter registration application contingent upon an affirmative request,” meaning
that the State’s current policy is a violation of the law.
“This is a yet another
significant victory for NVRA enforcement, not just in New Mexico, but all
across the country,” said Project Vote’s Director of Public Agency Voter
Registration, Nicole Zeitler. “Agencies must give out a voter registration
application form to everyone who applies for benefits, recertifies, or changes
address. Federal law requires it, the Department of Justice has confirmed it,
and now the federal courts are ordering it.”
The voting rights groups
are hailing this as the first legal ruling on the issue of whether clients must
“opt in” to be offered the opportunity to register to vote. “This should
be a wake-up call to other states whose agencies are still refusing to give out
voter registration applications unless the client specifically asks for it,”
says Zeitler.
The voting rights advocates
won on all fronts in yesterday’s ruling. Not only did the court grant
plaintiff’s motion for partial summary judgment, but it also denied both HSD’s and
the Secretary of State’s motions for summary judgment. In denying HSD’s motion,
the court pointed to plaintiff’s allegations of years of widespread non-compliance,
noting that “the Court cannot say as a matter of law that HSD has
demonstrated that it has the tools in place to be compliant in the future
without an injunction and Court monitoring.”
“The Court hit on the
exact reasons why we brought this case in the first place,” says Robert Kengle,
Acting Co-Director of the Lawyers’ Committee’s Voting Rights Project. “New Mexico’s public assistance
offices have been out of compliance with the NVRA for years, and nothing short
of comprehensive reform, ordered and monitored by the court, will repair the
damage that has been done to the voting rights of low-income New
Mexicans.”
In another important
decision, the District Court rejected Secretary of State Herrera’s claim that
her office is not responsible for ensuring compliance with the NVRA in New
Mexico. Relying on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeal’s decision in Harkless v. Brunner, an NVRA lawsuit
filed by the same voting rights groups in Ohio, Judge Herrera agreed with the
Sixth Circuit that “each state’s chief election official is responsible for
NVRA state compliance,” and that therefore “Defendant Herrera has the
obligation to prescribe the actions that the state, including HSD offices, must
take to comply with Section 7.”
“Courts now have repeatedly
confirmed that state election officials must take responsibility for ensuring
that low-income voters receive the voter registration opportunities required by
federal law,” said Demos’ Counsel Allegra Chapman. “This decision should
encourage chief election officials throughout the country to examine agency
practices on voter registration, and take corrective action when needed.”
The coalition of voting
rights groups has been advocating for enforcement of the NVRA in several
states, and settled a related claim against New Mexico’s Motor Vehicles
Division in July of this year. Following the groups’ successful lawsuit in Missouri
in 2008, voter registration applications submitted at the state’s public
assistance offices skyrocketed from fewer than 8,000 a year to more than 130,000
a year. Over 200,000 clients have applied to become registered voters in Ohio
after a similar lawsuit was settled in that state last year.
The groups estimate that
proper implementation nationwide of the NVRA’s public assistance provisions
could result in 2-3 million additional registrations per year.
To view the District
Court’s decision, and for more information on the NVRA and voting rights, visitwww.projectvote.org; www.demos.org; or www.lawyerscommittee.org.
###
CONTACTS:
Nicole Zeitler, Project Vote, (202) 271-5101
Tim Rusch,
Dēmos, (212) 389-1407
Dan DuPont, Lawyers’ Committee, (202) 380-7558
Cindy Ricketts, DLA Piper, (480) 606-5112
David Urias, Freeman, Boyd, Hollander, Goldberg & Ives,
(505) 842-9960