New Project Vote Report Examines Efforts to
Shut Down VR Drives
September 23, 2014
WASHINGTON, DC – As America celebrates National
Voter Registration Day, voting rights group Project Vote has released a new
report examining the restrictions many states have imposed on efforts to help
eligible citizens become registered voters.
“Since the civil rights
era, voter registration drives have played a key role in bringing unregistered
Americans and underrepresented populations into the electorate,” says Michael
Slater, executive director for Project Vote. “However, that legacy is now under
attack from partisan policy makers who want to make conducting a registration
drive prohibitively expensive and risky.”
As Project Vote attorneys Stephen Mortellaro and Michelle Kanter Cohen explain
in the report, Restricting Voter
Registration Drives, community-based efforts are essential for enabling
political participation, particularly among low-income Americans and racial and
ethnic minorities.
Americans making under $10,000 per year were the most likely to report
registering through a community-based voter registration drive in 2012, and reliance
on drives generally decreases as income rises. African Americans were twice as
likely as whites to report registering through a VR drive in 2012, with
Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans also reporting higher dependence on such
drives.
In the new report, Mortellaro and Kanter Cohen examine the legislative
backlash that followed the voter registration surges of the 2008 election, and
how many states have imposed laws that severely hinder efforts to reach eligible,
unregistered Americans.
Burdensome training requirements, overly narrow submission deadlines,
restrictions on who is allowed to canvass, and proof-of-citizenship
requirements are just some of the policy hurdles states have imposed to make
voter registration efforts more costly, more risky, and more difficult to
conduct.
“By deterring voter registration efforts, these laws have a disproportionate
impact on low-income and minority participation, and are holding back the American
dream of a truly representative democracy,” said Slater.
The report also examines the legal battles in the courts over the protections
afforded voter registration efforts under the First Amendment and the National
Voter Registration Act, and provides sensible, practical recommendations for
how state policy makers can work with, not against, efforts to enfranchise
eligible Americans.
You can download this new report here.
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For more information and interviews, please contact Michael McDunnah at 202-905-1397 or
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