Voting Rights Groups Call on State to Fix Voter Registration at DMVs, or Face Litigation

Demos Vice President of Policy & Outreach Lenore Palladino issued the following statement on Vermont’s passage of Same-Day Registration: "Demos applauds Vermont’s passage of Same-Day Registration (SDR), which will allow residents to register to vote and then cast a regular ballot in a one-stop

Voting matters. Though many Americans believe that voting is either useless or merely a civic duty, in reality it carries huge consequences for the decisions of politicians.

(New York, Raleigh, Washington, D.C.) – Citing clear evidence that the state of North Carolina is failing its obligation to provide low-income residents with a meaningful opportunity to register to vote at public assistance agencies, today Democracy North Carolina, Action NC, and the A. Philip

[...] Demos, the New York-based group, began monitoring North Carolina about a decade ago because it spotted a drop-off in public assistance registrations. Gary Bartlett, the State Board of Elections director at the time, was eager to attract more voters, said Stuart Naifeh, an attorney with Demos.

[...] This is not the first time North Carolina has fallen out of compliance with the NVRA. Dēmos, the New York-based group that has put North Carolina on notice, also monitored the state about 10 years ago after seeing a drop in voter registration applications processed by public assistance

After the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, many pointed at the gap between the black population and their overwhelmingly white elected officials as a symptom of the country’s problem with race.

When a group of voting rights advocates notified the state Department of Health and Human Services recently that North Carolina may not be living up to federal requirements that social services agencies help their clients register to vote, a spokeswoman indicated the department was surprised. [...]

[...] To date, the Senate has been mostly unsupportive of the Moreland Commission's proposals. The good government groups are hopeful the current wake of scandal will be enough to finally persuade lawmakers to enact real change. "We think that should be a wakeup call now to the Senate," Scharff said

Barring a dramatic scandal or an unforeseen event, Hillary Clinton will be the 2016 Democratic party nominee for president. While many on the left have complained about her close ties to banks and her past unwillingness to tackle inequality, such complaints are unlikely to be solved by any