In a country where 131 million people voted in the 2008 presidential
election, a few million more voters sprinkled across the states, just
might make a difference. In a handful of swing states, voting rights
groups have sued and won voting rights for hundreds of thousands of
low-income people, two-thirds of them women, in the last few years.
The results are impressive. In Missouri, where John McCain beat
Barack Obama by less than 4,000 votes, nearly a quarter-million voter
registration applications have been filed by people applying for state
public assistance since August '08. In Ohio, where George W. Bush beat
John Kerry by nearly 119,000 votes in 2004, low-income Ohioans filed
100,000 voter applications in just the first six months of 2010.
Project Vote, Demos, The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under
Law, and the local civil rights groups who sued these states and won
have been waging a lonely fight to implement the National Voter
Registration Act. The 1993 law requires a range of state agencies, not
just motor vehicles, to offer voter registration services.
That fight became a little less lonely in June, when, for the first
time, the Justice Department announced it would start enforcing the
NVRA's voter registration mandate. This isn't rocket science. This
April, 40 million Americans applied for food stamps. If even 10 percent
of those people registered to vote - the nation's voter rolls would get
a millions-strong boost.
The numbers from from Missouri and Ohio dwarf the size of the largest
Tea Party rallies and already, right-wingers fear these voters and NVRA
compliance, commenting on websites that poor people should not vote for
any number of ugly reasons. Now it's up to other candidates to
pay attention to voters who've until now been overlooked. Instead of
obsessing about the Tea Partiers -- give those newest voters some good
reason to use that vote!