Source:
McClatchyWASHINGTON - Representatives of three liberal-leaning groups came to the Justice Department in 2004, armed with evidence that hundreds of public-assistance agencies had illegally failed to offer voter registration to their mostly poor and minority clients.
Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act, which imposed the requirement, in 1993. But after these agencies registered 2.6 million people to vote in 1995-1996, the total registered plunged to about 1 million in 2003-2004.
Michael Slater, the Oregon-based deputy director of the national registration group Project Vote, said officials of the Justice Department's civil rights division showed little interest in enforcing that part of the law.
Officials for the three groups, as well as former lawyers in the division, cite the inaction by the Justice Department as further evidence that politics drove the Bush administration's operation of the nation's chief law enforcement agency.
The Bush Justice Department, they said, has largely ignored the voter registration sections of the law while aggressively using a narrower provision to sue or threaten to sue states that have failed to purge the names of allegedly ineligible people from voter rolls.
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http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/special_packages/usattorneys/17333144.htm
Briefing on President Bush's Nomination of Hans Von Spakovsky to the Federal Election Commission and His Ties to Voter Suppression at the
DOJ
To: POLITICAL EDITORS
Contact: Jonathan Rosen, +1-646-452-5637, for Brennan Center for Justice
WASHINGTON, June 6 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The following advisory was issued today by the Brennan Center for Justice and the Lawyers Committee:
What: By now it seems clear that at least three of the nine U.S. Attorneys pushed out by the Bush administration -- David Iglesias in New Mexico,
John McKay in Washington, Thomas Heffelfinger in Minnesota -- lost their jobs in part because they refused to prosecute voter fraud where it did
not exist. Mounting evidence reveals a much broader strategy on the part of the Administration to use federal agencies charged with protecting v
oting rights to promote voter suppression and influence election rules so as to gain partisan advantage in battleground states.
On Thursday lawyers from the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law will join former career
professionals in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division to discuss the impact of this strategy on legitimate voters, especially low- income and
minority citizens as well as students and seniors.
The briefing comes six days before the Senate Rules & Administration Committee holds a confirmation hearing for one of the architects of the
Administration's voter suppression program, Hans von Spakovsky, for a seat on the Federal Election Commission.more:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/usnw/20070606/pl_usnw/briefing_on_president_bush_s_nomination_of_hans_von_spakovsky_to_the_federal_election_commission_and_his_ties_to_voter_suppress