July 20, Report From Project Vote Evaluates Fifteen Years Of The NVRA
July 20, report from Project Vote Evaluates Fifteen Years of the NVRA
The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) was enacted to increase participation in American elections, but fifteen years after its passage it is clear that many problems the NVRA sought to address remain uncured, and the law's full promise remains unfulfilled.
This week Project Vote is proud to release The NVRA at Fifteen: A Report to Congress,the first comprehensive report evaluating the implementation of this landmark law. Written by voting rights attorney Estelle Rogers, the new report evaluates how four major provisions of the NVRA have -and more importantly haven't -been successfully implemented: the "motor voter" program, the mail-in registration form, public assistance agency registration, and list maintenance procedures.
As Frances Fox Piven, noted voting rights scholar and activist, explains in her foreword to The NVRA at Fifteen, "the reform of American registration procedures has met widespread resistance, some of it attributable no doubt to bureaucratic inertia, and some of it perhaps politically motivated." Rogers explains how lack of enforcement, failures of state and federal leadership, and restrictive court decisions have left the full potential of the NVRA unrealized, and have left millions of disenfranchised Americans still awaiting the promise of a truly inclusive democracy.
This new report is also a call for renewed leadership to improve the implementation of the NVRA nationwide, recommending practices that states can adopt to improve their compliance, offering suggestions for legislative changes Congress could enact, and emphasizing the importance of ensuring that the Department of Justice finally commits fully to enforcing the NVRA.
In addition to The NVRA at Fifteen, this week Project Vote is also releasing two additional reports on the NVRA that we hope you'll find useful in your work. A Review of Academic Literature on the Effectiveness of the NVRA, by Jody Herman, Douglas R. Hess, and Margaret Groarke, provides a summary and annotated bibliography of scholarly research on the impact of the NVRA, and points out the many opportunities for further study of the law, particularly on its impact on specific populations. The National Voter Registration Act: Case Summaries, by Teresa James and Nicole Kovite, offers a comprehensive analysis of litigation brought under the NVRA, with a primary focus on whether the litigation advanced or restricted interpretation of the law's provisions.
Project Vote is pleased to share these new publications, and we hope you'll join us in calling for long overdue action to realize, at last, the full promise of the NVRA. As Rogers states in her conclusion, "if the NVRA were--finally--vigorously enforced and properly interpreted, it could well be the transformative law that its authors envisioned."
To download The NVRA at Fifteen: A Report to Congress, click here.
To download A Review of Academic Literature on the Effectiveness of the NVRA, click here.
