Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Agencies slip in registering poor to vote

Poor people have less say at the polls in Nevada than in most of the nation — and public assistance offices appear to be partly to blame, according to a recently released report.

In 2006 workers at those offices registered fewer Nevadans to vote than they did in 1995, the year federal law began requiring such agencies to offer voter registration. The decline, the report says, might explain why 53 percent of Nevada’s low-income citizens 18 and older are not registered to vote — the third-highest percentage of the 44 states examined in the study.

The result is that even as Nevada’s population increases, participation by the poor in elections in the Silver State is shrinking, said Scott Novakowski, senior policy analyst for Demos, a New York-based think tank and advocacy center. Novakowski is one of the authors of the report “Unequal Access: Neglecting the National Voter Registration Act, 1995-2007.”

He argues that Nevada and other states could do more to put into effect the federal law that seeks to make voter registration routine at offices offering food stamps, welfare and Medicaid benefits. At stake is “political empowerment,” Novakowski said — particularly in light of the 2008 presidential election.

Novakowski’s center has filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Nevada secretary of state, whose office is charged with reporting voter data to the federal government, seeking more information on how the law is carried out. It took a similar step with only two other states — Virginia and West Virginia.

His report argues that the Justice Department, the federal agency charged with enforcing the law, is not doing its job either. Under the law, the department can sue states that aren’t complying with the law. Novakowski’s report notes that his organization and others have presented the Justice Department with data about noncompliant states, but the department has filed only one lawsuit in the past seven years, against Tennessee.

Using data Nevada gave to the federal government, the report shows that 13,200 people registered to vote in 1995 at offices offering the four main services covered by the law. That number had dropped to 3,307 by 2006.

The trend has occurred even as the state population grew from 1.5 million to 2.5 million during the time covered by the report. The number of people using social services has also risen, of course. For example, Novakowski said, the average monthly caseload for food stamps statewide rose from 36,000 in fiscal year 1998, the earliest year for which data were available, to 55,000 in 2006.

The law requires public assistance offices to indicate on a form whether people seeking services there are registered or not and to help people if they want to register.

But it is apparent that it hasn’t been happening as much in Nevada as it should have been.

“When we go out to low-income communities to register voters, we see a large percentage who are not registered and are eager to do so,” said Launce Rake, spokesman for the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada. That statewide nonprofit organization has been registering voters in recent months and seen results mirroring the Demos report.

“Why haven’t these people been reached before?”

Larry Lomax, Clark County registrar of voters, pointed out that Nevada suffers from problems with registering people to vote in general, because much of its population is transient, not highly educated, single and young.

“Every single category of demographic indicator would seem to predict less people registering,” he said.

In 2004, the most recent year for which U.S. Census Bureau data are available, 35 percent of Nevada citizens 18 and older were not registered to vote.

Matt Griffin, a spokesman for Nevada’s secretary of state, said the agency has been making changes since 2006 to be more proactive in complying with the law. He said the list of agencies statewide that are qualified to register voters “hadn’t been touched in 12 years” before 2006, meaning the qualifications of those agencies and the way their staffs were trained to carry out the law had not been reviewed. Griffin added that the state has also centralized its data collection on voters in the past three years, instead of having them spread out over 17 databases, one for each county.

Andres Ramirez, director of Hispanic programs for the New Democratic Network, a national group, said the Nevada secretary of state’s office exhibited a “lack of activity ... in terms of voter registration and education” for more than a decade.

“The more proactive the secretary of state is in ensuring that election laws are adhered to, the more likely it is that this is going to happen,” he said.

Novakowski said Nevada and too many other states aren’t as successful as they should be at registering low-income citizens to vote because the law has “simply fallen off the radar screen.”

Lomax, however, said his agency has consistently trained supervisors of social service agencies to follow the law in his 10 years at the county Election Department.

At the same time, Griffin’s and Lomax’s staffs both supplied data since 2004 that showed the same low numbers in voter registration from offices supplying the four main services covered by the law. The county’s data show a slight increase in 2007, a period not covered in Demos’ report. But that total still doesn’t come close to the statewide figure for 1995. Lomax said he could not explain the drop in numbers over time.

The county data also had gaps in reporting from Clark County’s 14 Women, Infants and Children nutrition program offices, known as clinics. Two of the five agencies that run the clinics reported no data at all from 2004 to 2008. Donna Cardinelli, assistant registrar of voters, suggested the gaps may be because of applicants for that service mailing in their registration forms to the Election Department instead of filling them out at the clinics.

Dave Crockett, WIC program manager, said 55,447 women were using WIC statewide in October, the most recent month for which data were available. At least 70 percent of them live in Clark County. About 63 percent are Hispanic. Crockett said voter registration forms are available in Spanish, but didn’t know how long that had been the case.

Crockett also said the applications for WIC include the required question about whether the applicant is registered to vote. At the same time, he said, the agency doesn’t keep track of the number of voter registration forms the clinics hand out or get back.

His agency “materially complies with the law,” he said. Asked if front-line staff could do more to encourage people to register, Crockett said that “the more time you ask workers to devote to voter registration, the less time you devote to providing benefits ... the real reason you’re there.”

The issue, he added, is “an interesting public policy debate.”

Novakowski and his colleagues believe it is a lot more than that. Another one of their Freedom of Information Act requests went to WIC in Nevada.

Three of five people outside two area WIC clinics on a recent afternoon said they had not been asked by the workers inside whether they were registered to vote.

Arlene Machuca, 20, said she hadn’t been asked the question, but had registered on her own. She thought it was important for minorities to get involved because many feel as if they don’t have a voice.

“If they were encouraged to vote,” she said, “that would change.”

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