Blessings,
This article was written in the Orlando Sentinel. You can copy and paste it.
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/opinion/views/orl-myword15a08apr15,0,119871.story
Beverly Campbell
April 15, 2008
All Americans deserve an equal opportunity to register to vote.
Unfortunately, bureaucrats in Florida and many other states are
offering
only some Americans and not others an opportunity to register to vote.
Picking and choosing who gets to register is not just unfair, it
violates an important federal voting-rights law.
To the extent that Americans believe voter registration is easy, it is
because of the National Voter Registration Act. It is a law that
requires states to offer individuals an opportunity to register to vote
when they apply for or renew their drivers license (the "motor voter"
law). The act also requires states to provide voter registration
services to people when they apply for public assistance, such as
Medicaid and Food Stamps. And states must designate other government
offices, such as libraries, as voter-registration agencies.
New research by voting-rights groups Project Vote and Demos shows that
Florida and many other states are failing to offer voter registration
at
public-assistance agencies even though they provide voter registration
services at motor-vehicle offices. When the National Voter Registration
Act's requirement went into effect in 1995-1996, Florida helped 158,836
residents register at public-assistance agencies. But in 2005-2006 that
number declined to 13,436, a drop of 92 percent. Nationally,
registrations have declined from 2.6 million to just 550,000 in the
same
period.
Congress enacted the National Voter Registration Act in 1993 to
overcome
nearly a hundred years of efforts by state politicians to game the
system with voter-registration laws that made it harder for some groups
to register to vote than others. In the South, white Democrats
manipulated registration laws to keep blacks and poor whites off the
rolls. In the North, rural Republicans used registration requirements
to
weaken urban Democrats. When the National Voter Registration Act was
introduced, one of its legislative sponsors said it would complete the
work Congress began with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
And the act has largely worked. Almost half of all voter-registration
applications submitted in this country are from motor-vehicle
departments. But not everyone drives, which is why the
public-assistance-agency provision was so important to include in the
law. Partly as a result of states' failure to comply with the National
Voter Registration Act, the number of low-income Americans who are not
registered to vote is twice the rate of affluent Americans. In Florida,
40 percent of low-income residents are not registered to vote, compared
to 22 percent of upper-income residents.
The long-term consequence of this disparity is that our communities
lose
some of the political power we need to solve pressing problems like the
home-foreclosure crisis and poor health care. This is why Florida ACORN
(Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) wants to help
200,000 Floridians register to vote in 2008 and why we are pressing the
state to provide voter-registration services at public-assistance
agencies.
Beverly Campbell of Orlando is a board member for the Association of
Community Organization for Reform Now.
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