I thought you'd find this story of interest. S



>
> Bush Government to Poor Voters: We Don't Want You to
> Vote
>
> By Steven Rosenfeld,
>
> AlterNet - Posted on July 17, 2007
> http://www.alternet.org/story/56957/
>
> 	The Justice Department is pressuring 10 states
> 	to purge their voter rolls, while states are
> 	ignoring laws to help low-income Americans
> 	register to vote
>
> State welfare offices across the country are not
> offering millions of low-income Americans the
> opportunity to register to vote when applying for public
> assistance despite a federal law requiring them to do
> so, according to an analysis of a recent federal voting
> registration report and experts who say the Department
> of Justice and states are to blame.
>
> "It's huge. It's another area where the administration
> is failing us," said Donna Brazile, chair of the
> Democratic National Committee's Voting Rights Institute,
> speaking of the Department of Justice's oversight of the
> nation's voter registration laws. "They are not pushing
> states to recognize their voter registration
> responsibilities."
>
> At the same time, the Justice Department's Voting
> Section, which enforces voting rights and supervises
> elections in some states, is pressuring 10 states to do
> more to purge voter rolls -- or remove ineligible voters
> -- before the 2008 presidential election, according to
> letters sent to state election officials this spring.
>
> "We conducted an analysis of each state's total voter
> registration numbers as a percentage of citizen voting
> age population," wrote John Tanner, the Department of
> Justice Voting Section chief, in an April 18, 2007,
> letter to North Carolina's top election official. "We
> write now to assess the changes in your voter
> registration list ... and the subsequent removal of
> persons no longer eligible to vote."
>
> Cynthia Magnuson, a Justice Department spokeswoman,
> confirmed in an e-mail that similar letters had been
> sent to 10 states, but did not list the recipients. "The
> Department actively works with all states to comply with
> all provisions of the statutes we enforce," she said.
>
> Voter lists are updated because people move, die or lose
> their right to vote if convicted of felonies. But
> because this process occurs out of public view and
> without much regulation, it can be open to partisan
> abuse or produce incorrect results, such as in Florida
> in 2000 when more than 50,000 voters were incorrectly
> removed from voter registration lists.
>
> The contrast of a Justice Department that apparently has
> not enforced voter registration opportunities for poor
> people -- who tend to vote Democratic -- and a
> department that is pressuring states to more thoroughly
> trim voter rolls has prompted some voting rights
> advocates to accuse the agency of selective enforcement
> and partisan bias.
>
> "I think it's pretty clear the Justice Department is
> pursing a partisan agenda to get states to purge voters
> while ignoring requirements to get states to register
> voters," said Michael Slater, deputy director of Project
> Vote, a national nonprofit specializing in voter
> registration drives targeting low- and moderate-income
> families.
>
> Voting Section chief John Tanner did return a telephone
> call to discuss his office's priorities and
> accomplishments. On Monday, July 16, the House Judiciary
> Committee announced it was postponing a hearing
> scheduled for Tuesday, July 17 "because the Department
> refused to make Voting Section chief John Tanner
> available to testify," its press release said.
>
> However, Hans A. Von Spakovsky, a former assistant
> attorney general who served four years as a top Civil
> Rights Division lawyer overseeing the Voting Rights
> Section discussed accusations of changing "the
> enforcement direction of the department" in a June 29,
> 2007, letter to the Senate Rules Committee. He became a
> federal elections commissioner in December 2005, and his
> appointment is under review.
>
> Von Spakovsky's 18-page letter is a detailed defense of
> some of the department's most controversial recent
> rulings, such as approving a Texas congressional
> redistricting plan and a Georgia voter I.D. law that
> later was blocked in court as a violation of the
> Constitutional amendment barring poll taxes. Nowhere in
> the often-technical letter is any mention in section 7
> of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), which is
> intended to help poor people vote by requiring state
> welfare agencies to offer the chance to register.
>
> Instead, Von Spakovsky defended an aggressive stance
> with enforcing the NVRA's voter purge provisions, which
> fall under section 8 of the law. "The division could not
> willfully ignore the list maintenance requirements of
> the NVRA," he wrote. "It is the responsibility of DOJ to
> enforce these laws."
>
> While the national media has followed the department's
> firing of U.S. attorneys who, in some cases, did not
> pursue voter fraud cases -- another priority of longtime
> GOP lawyer-activists like Von Spakovsky -- the
> department's oversight of the nation's voter rolls has
> mostly gone unnoticed. The potential impact on the 2008
> election could be enormous, however, especially if
> millions of disenfranchised people registered and voted.
>
> A just-released federal voter registration report
> reveals the stakes. In late June, the Election
> Assistance Commission issued a biennial voter
> registration report to Congress for 2005 and 2006. The
> report found that 16.6 million new registration
> applications were received by state motor vehicles
> agencies while only 527,752 applications came from state
> public assistance offices -- a 50 percent drop from
> 2003-2004. The report also found 13.0 million voters
> were purged nationwide and 9.9 million were put on
> "inactive" status, meaning these people have to provide
> identification before receiving a 2008 ballot.
>
> The potential number of public assistance recipients who
> could register runs into the millions. According to the
> Health Resources and Services Administration's FY 2008
> budget, federally subsidized "health centers" will serve
> an estimated 16.3 million patients, a population where
> "91 percent are at or below 200 percent of the federal
> poverty level, 64 percent are from racial/ethnic
> minority groups and 40 percent are uninsured." This is
> the same population who typically seek a variety of
> federally subsidized public assistance, from food stamps
> to fuel assistance to welfare.
>
> Another indication of how many poor people could
> register is Tennessee, whose elections are federally
> supervised. From 2005-2006, Tennessee registered 120,992
> people at public assistance offices -- nearly a quarter
> of the national total, the EAC reported. Tennessee
> registered more voters than the combined totals of
> welfare office registrations from California, Colorado,
> Florida, Illinois, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia
> and Washington.
>
> Karen Lynn Dyson, EAC Research director, said there were
> several reasons why many states have not made voter
> registration more available through public assistance
> agencies. First, the NVRA was passed in 1993, and many
> state and county election officials have been paying
> more attention to newer federal election mandates and
> transitioning to new voting machines. Moreover, many
> state welfare agencies don't see voter registration in
> their job descriptions -- despite the federal law. The
> same factors were also cited by Project Vote's Michael
> Slater, who emphasized that low-income people tend to
> move more often than better-off Americans.
>
> "Our organization exists to correct the problem that
> voting is skewed toward upper-income folks," he said.
> "We are trying to make voting more representative of the
> population."
>
> Justice Department spokesperson Cynthia Magnuson cited
> two department enforcement actions concerning increased
> voter registration; suing New York in 2004 because its
> state universities did not "offer voter registration
> opportunities at those offices serving students with
> disabilities," and the department's 2002 suit against
> Tennessee, which led to federal oversight of its
> elections. The New York suit is still pending.
>
> Scott Novakowski, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a
> centrist public policy group based in New York that has
> followed this issue for several years, said it was
> ironic the Justice Department cited Tennessee because
> that state's welfare office registrations reveal how
> many potential voters could be involved if the
> department enforced the law.
>
> "This is not a lot of numbers until you see Tennessee,"
> he said. "We have looked at how many people can feasibly
> get on the rolls and it is enormous. Tennessee is under
> a court order and is doing it right. If you look at the
> number of people who go through public assistance
> offices, in some states it is in the millions."
>
> The public interest groups that have tracked this issue
> -- Demos, Project Vote, ACORN and the Lawyers Committee
> for Civil Rights Under Law -- have issued reports citing
> a steady downward trend in these voter registrations and
> met with Justice Department officials in 2005 to present
> their findings and concerns.
>
> "In January 2005, we had a 10-year report, which
> documented the 59 percent decline from 1995 through
> 2004," Novakowski said, adding follow-up letters cited
> violations from Arizona, Connecticut, Florida,
> Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey,
> Pennsylvania and Tennessee. "John Conyers (now the House
> Judiciary Committee chairman) and 29 other
> representatives asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales
> to look into this, and there was no response."
>
> This spring, after learning of Voting Section letters to
> North Carolina and Kentucky pressuring those states to
> more aggressively purge their voter lists, the same
> coalition called on the House and Senate Judiciary
> committees to investigate the "selective enforcement" of
> voter registration laws.
>
> "We are concerned that the Justice Department's Voting
> Section is ignoring the primary purpose of NVRA to
> "establish procedures that will increase the number if
> eligible citizens who register to vote in elections for
> federal office."" it wrote in a May 8, 2007, letter.
> "Instead, the Voting Section is concentrating its NVRA
> enforcement priority on pressuring states to conduct
> massive purges of their voter rolls."
>
> [Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at Alternet.org and
> co-author of What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record
> of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election, with Bob
> Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman (The New Press, 2006).]
>
> (c) 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights
> reserved.
>
> _____________________________________________
>
> Portside aims to provide material of interest
> to people on the left that will help them to
> interpret the world and to change it.
>
> Submit via email: [log in to unmask]
> Submit via the Web: portside.org/submit
> Frequently asked questions: portside.org/faq
> Subscribe: portside.org/subscribe
> Unsubscribe: portside.org/unsubscribe
> Account assistance: portside.org/contact
> Search the archives: portside.org/archive