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翻译：

星期二， 2007年7月17日

创造您自己的现实？ 被暴露的下意识秘密 对再不要说谎! 什么您不应该知道

由 史蒂文Rosenfeld

而状态忽略法律帮助低收入美国人登记投票，司法部迫使10个状态清洗他们的选民卷。

状态福利救济办公室全国各地不提供成千上万低收入美国人机会登记投票，当申请支持公众协助尽管要求他们的联邦法律根据对一个最近联邦投票的注册报告的分析时如此做，并且说司法部和状态的专家将责备。

“它是巨大的。 它是另一个区域，管理发生故障我们”，说唐娜Brazile，民主党全国委员会选举权学院的椅子，讲话司法部国家的选民登记法律的失察。 “他们不推挤状态认可他们的选民登记责任”。

同时，司法部的投票的部分，在有些状态强制执行选举权并且监督竞选，迫使10个状态做更多在2008总统选举之前清洗选民卷-或去除不合格的选民-，根据信被送到状态竞选官员今年春天。

“我们在2007年4月18日，给北卡罗来纳的高级竞选官员的信件进行了对每个状态的总选民登记数字的分析作为公民投票年龄人口的百分比”，写约翰Tanner，司法部投票的部长。 “我们现在写不再估计在您的选民登记名单…和人上随后撤除的变化有权投票”。

辛西亚Magnuson，司法部女发言人，证实在电子邮件相似的信被送了到10个状态，但没有列出接收者。 “部门活跃地与所有状态一起使用遵照我们强制执行法规的所有供应”，她说。

选民名单更新，因为人们移动，死或者丢失他们的权利投票，如果判罪重罪。 但，因为这个过程发生在公开看法外面和，不用章程，它可以是开放的到党羽恶习或导致不正确结果， 2000年例如在佛罗里达，当超过50,000个选民从选民登记名单时不正确地被去除了。

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.”

Have Your Say: Bush Government to Poor Voters: We Don’t Want You to Vote
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 10:06 pm and is filed under Political News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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