Voting Rights Groups Set Record Straight on Lawsuit Targeted by State Republican Party
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: October 16, 2009
Contacts:
Dēmos: Tim Rusch, 917 399-0236
Lawyers' Committee: Stacie Royster, 202 662-8317
Project Vote: Michael McDunnah, 202 905-1397
The Missouri Republican State Committee has launched a website and attack ad targeting Secretary of State Robin Carnahan that makes false and deceptive allegations about a lawsuit that found serious voting rights violations by the State of Missouri. Today the voting rights organizations Dēmos, Project Vote, and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law issued the following joint statement in response:
As organizations with a longstanding commitment to protecting the voting rights of all Americans, we are disappointed that the Missouri Republican State Committee has created an ad and website that seek to use the vital issue of voting rights for political gain. These attacks blatantly mischaracterize the lawsuit our organizations filed in 2008 against the Missouri Department of Social Services (DSS), and by extension attack and denounce the unprecedented gains the lawsuit achieved for all Missourians.
The lawsuit was filed after our organizations obtained strong evidence that Missouri DSS was failing to carry out its responsibility to provide voter registration services to public assistance clients as required by an important federal voting rights law, the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). Our organizations, together with the law firm of Dewey & LeBoeuf and Kansas City attorney Arthur Benson, represented Dionne O'Neal, one of the many Missouri residents and public assistance clients who were not provided with the opportunity to register to vote as required by the NVRA, along with the community organization ACORN, as plaintiffs in a suit to bring the state into compliance with this critical law.
After a hearing, United States District Judge Nanette K. Laughrey issued a preliminary injunction in July 2008, finding that our claims were supported by overwhelming evidence that hundreds of thousands of Missourians had been denied the opportunity to register to vote at Missouri public agencies over a period of several years. As a result of the Court's order directing DSS immediately to comply with its voter registration responsibilities, voter registration applications through public assistance agencies have skyrocketed. Over 147,000 Missouri citizens have applied to register to vote at public assistance offices during the 12 months since the order was entered, increasing monthly registrations nearly twenty-fold.
Because of the lawsuit, state agencies now are taking responsibility for voter registration, rather than leaving the burden solely on private groups such as ACORN to conduct voter registration. That the GOP would criticize this successful lawsuit ensuring that voter registration is conducted by state employees at state agencies, while also claiming to oppose ACORN's voter registration efforts, exposes the utter absurdity of these recent attacks.
Because of the court's ruling and the unequivocal evidence that DSS had failed to comply with the law, in June 2009 DSS agreed to a final settlement of the case, and to its credit now has reversed the state's previous unfortunate record and stands as a full partner in ensuring the voting rights of all Missouri citizens. Contrary to the misleading allegations that have been made, Secretary of State Robin Carnahan and her office did not negotiate the terms of the settlement, because she was not a defendant in the case.
The GOP's cynical video attempts to rile public outrage by stating that "half a million in taxpayer dollars" allegedly went to ACORN as a result of the lawsuit. This is a deliberate falsehood. ACORN received not one cent of this money. Under federal civil rights statutes, Missouri was liable for the fees and costs of the litigation, and therefore it is standard procedure in these cases to include attorneys' fees and costs as part of any settlement. These fees-totaling approximately $450,000-were standard legal costs paid to the law firms and organizations that represented the plaintiffs, not to ACORN itself.
The Republican State Committee also attempts to attack Secretary Carnahan because plaintiffs acknowledged that her office was "helpful" in attempting to ensure compliance with the NVRA. This is both disappointing and troubling, because it suggests that the GOP would prefer to see state officials breaking the law instead of complying with it.
Correspondence and e-mails cited in the ad as some kind of sinister conspiracy amount to nothing more than routine requests for state documents that were necessary to the lawsuit and testimony to authenticate the documents. Moreover, the notice letters that our organizations sent to Secretary Carnahan, advising her of the evidence of noncompliance, are required under the NVRA before commencing a lawsuit, and are no different from notice letters our organizations have sent to Secretaries of State or chief election officers in over a dozen states in the past two years. Our lawsuit ultimately was necessary, quite simply, because a state agency under the control of then-Governor Matt Blunt had unfortunately ignored its legal responsibility to provide voter registration.
In the wake of the federal court's July 2008 injunction, we are proud to have worked with Missouri officials to reach a resolution of the important issues in this case, and we appreciate the state's renewed commitment to ensuring that citizens receiving public assistance will be afforded the opportunity to register to vote, just as is true for citizens applying for drivers' licenses. Through this lawsuit and the settlement, Missouri is once again becoming a leader in this area after years of neglect by previous administrations, with some 147,000 low-income Missourians joining the democratic process. It is disappointing to see that the state Republican Party thinks this success is a cause for slander rather than celebration.
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