Last week, the Senate Rules Committee heard testimony on the Ballot Integrity Act of 2007 (S. 1487). Senators Diane Feinstein and Christopher Dodd are the bill’s chief sponsors, but Senators Biden, Boxer, Brown, Clinton, Inouye, Kennedy, Leahy, Menendez, Leahy, and Obama have also signed on. While much of the bill is taken up with voting equipment standards, a significant number of voting rights issues are also addressed. These include increased safeguards for voters from being purged, uniform requirements for training poll workers to a set of minimal standards, and equitable allocation of polling place resources. Most importantly, the bill prohibits states from restricting voter registration drives.

Voter registration drives by nongovernmental entities play a critical role in the health of our democracy. They have been effective vehicles through which eligible Americans from traditionally disenfranchised communities have become registered to vote. According to the US Census, 12 million Americans have registered to vote through a voter registration drive, accounting for 8.5 percent of all registered voters. Minority voters, in particular, rely on the voter registration drives. Fifteen percent of Blacks, 15.5 percent of Latinos and 12.5 percent of Asians registered to vote through a drive compared to 8.6 percent for White non-Hispanic voters. In fact, Blacks and Latinos are 65 percent more likely to have registered through a voter registration drive than Whites.

Despite, or perhaps because of , the importance of voter registration drives for minority political participation, a number of states have taken steps to curtail voter registration drives. Since 2004, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, New Mexico and Ohio have imposed laws or rules that have either rendered voter registration drives ineffective or caused them to cease operation. Fortunately, federal courts in several districts have recognized that these burdensome laws and rules infringe on organizations’ political and associational speech rights and have struck them down.

Recently, the media has started to notice that the Ballot Integrity of 2007 protects voter registration drives. The Nation’s editor, Katrina vanden Heuvel, wrote in her “Editor’s Cut” blog that, “Burying pro-democracy activists in paperwork or forcing them to comply with burdensome and unjustifiable regulations are less violent than the tactics used against civil rights activists 40 years ago. But the impact is similar: minority and lower-income citizens are stopped from exercising their right to vote.” And reporter Steven Rosenfeld asks “Are Voter Registration Drives Being Put out of Business?” in an article that examines the politics behind the attacks on voter registration drives.