Voting Matters Blog

A voting rights coalition sent a letter to Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner today, alerting him that Florida’s plan to identify and remove alleged non-citizens from the voter rolls violates federal law and must cease immediately. Earlier this month, the Florida Division of Elections sent count

The House of Representatives voted 232-190 to defund the American Community Survey this month, supposedly on the grounds of budgetary and privacy concerns. Unfortunately, this shortsighted view will sacrifice long-term financial efficiency for a relatively small cost savings. As the Policy Analyst f

Voter suppression bills SB 751, 754, and 803—which place new regulatory requirements on community-based voter registration drives and expand the use of photo ID, among other things—were voted out of committee this morning. Before a packed-to-overflowing hearing room, the committee heard about 45 min

Voter ID proponents often claim that requiring citizens to present government-issued photo ID to vote is not a burden to democracy since there are few things that you can do without ID in America. Not true, says Fair Elections Legal Network. Josh Spaulding breaks down when we actually do or do not n

Yesterday, voting rights groups filed suit against the Secretary of the Commonwealth and the Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance for violating their federally mandated responsibilities to offer tens of thousands of public assistance clients the opportunity to register to vote. Congre

The civil rights movement lost a hero yesterday: Nicholas Katzenbach, whom I was privileged to know for over 20 years. Even his name said a lot:  Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach.  A son of privilege. Exeter and Princeton, a distinguished stint in World War II, then back to Yale Law School and a Rho

Florida’s list-matching procedure that compares the voter rolls with the motor vehicle’s records to vet out “potential non-citizens” may hurt the democratic process more than it helps. According to the Miami Herald blog, Naked Politics, approximately 2,700 out of 12 million registered voters have be

Voting rights advocates won an important legal victory that will ensure that Louisiana’s public assistance agency clients—the state’s poorest and most marginalized residents—will be offered an opportunity to register to vote. In a forceful decision, a federal judge ruled in favor of the Louisiana St

Attorneys from Demos, Project Vote, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law sent a pre-litigation notice letter on Monday to the Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth charging that the state is failing to provide low-income residents with a legally-mandated opportunity to register