Shirking a voting law

Sunday, March 2, 2008 | 2:06 a.m.

Low-income people, while visiting offices that offer public assistance, are supposed to be asked if they are registered to vote. If they are not, but would like to be, they are also supposed to be offered assistance.

This service is specified in the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. Many people know this legislation as the Motor Voter Act, and remember it only for its requirement that voter registration services be available at state motor vehicle departments.

But this requirement alone would not have achieved the law’s goal, which was to increase the turnout at elections by making it more convenient for all people to register to vote. Because many low-income people do not own vehicles, the law also specified that public assistance offices must offer voter registration services.

In 2005, 10 years after the law went into effect, three public advocacy groups — Project VOTE, based in Washington, D.C.; Demos, based in New York City; and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which has offices all over the country — began researching public assistance offices to see if they were complying.

What they began finding was that many states were neglecting the section of the law dealing with public assistance offices. Las Vegas Sun reporter Timothy Pratt wrote about the groups’ recently finished report in Friday’s paper.

The report, which covers 1995 through 2006, faults Nevada for a lackluster effort in recent years. It documents that 13,200 people were registered at state public assistance offices in 1995. That number, however, had fallen to 3,307 by 2006, even though the state’s population had grown by 1 million during that period.

The report also says 53 percent of Nevada’s low-income citizens 18 and older are not registered to vote.

We believe the Nevada secretary of state and county registrars should reenergize voter registration programs at public assistance offices. We realize those offices are busy but time must always be made to fully comply with the law and help underrepresented people empower themselves at the ballot box.