SOUTHERN EXPOSURE

October 29, 2004

Does Throwing Out Incomplete Registrations Violate Election Law?

Provisional balloting is not the only HAVA-related issue under the DOJ’s enforcement powers that has generated conflict between Democrats and Republicans. In Florida and other states, plans to throw out at least 10,000 incomplete voter registrations have prompted howls of protests from Democrats and civil rights leaders.

People for the American Way Foundation, the AFL-CIO, and others unsuccessfully sued when Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood announced in September that registrations in which a box attesting U.S. citizenship was not checked off would be disqualified. By signing the registration form, those prospective voters had already stated they were citizens, the plaintiffs argued.

Hood was appointed to her job by Gov. Jeb Bush, President Bush’s younger brother.

More than 10,000 incomplete registrations have been disqualified, 35 percent of which belonged to black voters and 25 percent of which belonged to Latino voters, according to an Oct. 13 press release by the Foundation. In North Carolina’s Wake County, about a thousand incomplete registrations were deemed invalid by election officials, according to the Raleigh News & Observer.

Other states are handling the issue differently. Iowa Secretary of State Chet Culver has announced that registrations without the citizenship box checked off will be considered valid. His decision prompted the state’s Republican Party to threaten a lawsuit, according to an Oct. 25 story in the Des Moines Register. Iowa Republicans are also up in arms about Culver’s plan to allow provisional ballots to be counted outside of voter’s correct precincts.

Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland and Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) have urged Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Alexander Acosta to clarify the DOJ’s position on whether incomplete registrations should be thrown out.

“It has been reported to me that one or more representatives of the Civil Rights Division have told state election officials that the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) precludes a state from processing a voter registration form on which the voter fails to check the citizenship box even if the voter has expressly attested on the form to his or her citizenship,” Hoyer wrote Acosta on Sept. 23. “As the principal sponsor of HAVA in the U.S. House of Representatives, I can assure you that is not what HAVA requires. In fact, it is contrary to the letter and the spirit of HAVA and the National Voter Registration Act.”

Hoyer asked Acosta to put the rumors to rest. A spokesperson for Hoyer said on Oct. 20 that the congressman hadn’t heard from the DOJ since. The department also declined to comment for this story on whether Voting Section officials had advised Hood to disqualify the incomplete registrations.

- Jordan Green