Lawsuit filed today to force
state public assistance offices to comply with the National Voter Registration
Act
June 6, 2011
ATLANTA, GA. –A coalition of voting rights groups filed suit
today against Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp and Commissioner of the
Georgia Department of Human Services (DHS) Clyde J. Reese III to remedy the
State of Georgia’s failure to provide voter registration services at state
public assistance offices, as required by the National Voter Registration Act
of 1993 (NVRA).
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of the Georgia State
Conference of the NAACP (Georgia NAACP) and the Coalition for the Peoples’
Agenda (Peoples’ Agenda). The plaintiffs are represented by lawyers from
Project Vote, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Dēmos, the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the NAACP, and the law firm Dechert LLP.
“The State of Georgia has been ignoring its responsibilities
under the NVRA for too many years,” said Nicole Zeitler, director of the Public
Agency Voter Registration program at Project Vote. “The result is that
thousands of low-income Georgians have been denied the opportunity to register
to vote.”
Section 7 of the NVRA requires that all public assistance
offices in Georgia distribute a voter registration application each time a
client applies for benefits, recertifies, or fills out a change of address
form. The lawsuit alleges that Georgia has been largely ignoring this mandate
for many years.
According to the Complaint filed in federal district court
in Atlanta, there has been a dramatic decline in the number of persons
registering to vote at Georgia public assistance offices since the NVRA first
took effect in the mid-1990s. During the 1995-1996 reporting period, DHS
received more than 100,000 registration applications, but in 2010 the number of
registrations had dropped to a mere 4,430. By comparison, in 2009, Georgia, on
average, received nearly 70,000 applications each month for just one of the
public assistance programs (Food Stamps) covered by the NVRA’s voter
registration requirements. The
Complaint further alleges that the lack of compliance shown by these data was
confirmed by recent surveys of public assistance clients conducted at selected
public assistance offices in Georgia.
“Georgia public officials must take seriously their legal
responsibility to provide voter registration services to the State’s public
assistance clients,” said Bob Kengle, co-director of the Lawyers’ Committee’s
Voting Rights Project. “Congress required that public assistance offices serve
as voter registration agencies to ensure that low income persons, who
historically have been disenfranchised, are given a periodic opportunity to register
to vote or update their existing voter registration.”
DHS policy and Georgia law both run afoul of the NVRA’s
requirements. DHS policy has specified that clients who once decline an offer
to register to vote should never be offered registration again, which clearly
violates the NVRA’s requirement that voter registration be offered with each application, recertification, and
change of address. Georgia state law only requires that voter registration
services be offered to persons completing transactions in person, despite the
Department of Justice’s instruction that voter registration must be provided
for remote transactions as well.
In addition, the Secretary of State has admitted that “DHS
did not have consistent NVRA policies” at its public assistance offices. This
further indicates the lack of care taken by state officials in ensuring that
the NVRA is being properly implemented in Georgia.
“We had hoped to remedy the lack of NVRA enforcement without
filing a lawsuit, but voting rights are too important to put on hold,” said
Laughlin McDonald, Director of the ACLU Voting Rights Project.
“When states violate the NVRA, they have the opportunity to
take corrective action after receiving notice of the violation,” said Allegra
Chapman, counsel at Demos. “We had hoped the Secretary’s office would want to
remedy the violations quickly and efficiently. Because that has not happened,
plaintiffs had no other choice but to sue to ensure that, going forward,
low-income Georgia citizens receive the voter registration opportunities to
which they’re entitled.”
The Complaint asks the court to ensure that defendants take
all necessary action to bring about compliance with the NVRA. This must include
proper procedures for distributing voter registration applications, training of
public assistance office personnel as to their voter registration
responsibilities, and measures to track voter registration data and monitor
compliance.
In the past several years,
lawsuits filed by voting rights groups have forced other states that had been
violating the NVRA to comply, with dramatic results. For example, voter
registration applications from Missouri public assistance agencies skyrocketed,
from fewer than 8,000 a year to over 130,000 a year, following settlement of a
suit in that state in 2008. More than 200,000 low-income Ohioans have applied
to register since a similar case was settled there at the end of 2009. Settlements
also recently have been reached in New Mexico and Indiana, and a similar
lawsuit was filed in Louisiana in April of this year.
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Contacts:
Niyati Shah, Project Vote (202) 553-5415
Stacie Royster, Lawyers’
Committee, (202) 662-8317
Lauren Strayer, Demos, (212) 389-1407
Anson Asaka, NAACP, (410) 580.5789
Beth Huffman, Dechert LLP, (215) 994-6761