Front Page  news  state

Friday, July 25, 2008

Voter Registration Rules Challenged

By Scott Sandlin
Journal Staff Writer
       Four nonprofit groups that target low-income, young, minority, disabled and out-of-the-country voters mounted a legal challenge Thursday to a 2005 state law that overhauled voter registration rules.
    The lawsuit claims that the rules aggressively discourage voter participation and are so burdensome that groups have either given up or vastly curtailed their efforts to register voters.
    "This law will effectively keep many voter registration drives away from the communities where they are needed most," said Katryn Fraher of New Mexico Public Interest Research Group, one of the organizations filing suit.
    The lawsuit was filed in state District Court in Albuquerque on behalf of the American Association of People with Disabilities, the Federation of American Women's Clubs Overseas, Inc., NMPIRG Education Fund and the SouthWest Organizing Project.
    The complaint asks the court to declare the law invalid under the state and federal constitutions because it violates the right to free speech and association.
    Albuquerque attorney Pat Rogers, who has represented parties supporting more rigorous voting requirements in other lawsuits, said the rules being challenged "don't go far enough."
    "The registration requirements and rules are not particularly onerous, not difficult and they were enacted unanimously by the Democrats and signed by the governor," he said.
    Spokesmen for the parties filing suit quoted U.S. Census Bureau figures as showing more than 100,000 voters in the last election cycle were registered by third-party voter registration groups, and about 15 percent of all New Mexico voters having been signed up in voter drives.
    The challenged law was enacted after the 2004 election cycle amid allegations of voter fraud that John Boyd, an Albuquerque attorney in the case, called "a myth perpetrated to mislead the public and intimidate voter registration groups."
    Rogers said the rules were aimed at correcting specific problems that have occurred in New Mexico and called the lawsuit "an ill-advised attack on the system."
    For instance, Rogers said, in the 2004 election, registration forms were stolen from one of the so-called 527s, or independent political groups — but only Republican registrations vanished. He also recalled that when authorities picked up a Cuban crack dealer illegally in the country during a drug bust, they also found expired voter registration forms.
    Wendy Weiser, an attorney for the groups at Brennan Center for Justice in New York, called the New Mexico requirements, such as a 48-hour deadline for turning in completed voter registration forms, among the most chilling and restrictive in the nation.
    Similarly restrictive rules have been invalidated by courts in Florida, Ohio and Georgia.
    "They were all punitive schemes," Weiser said of those states' rules. Florida and New Mexico share a short turnaround time for delivery of completed registration forms, she said, but New Mexico's 48 hours is far more restrictive than Florida's 10 days. And there are potential civil and criminal penalties for violations here.
    Both Florida and New Mexico rules require preregistration and training, but Florida didn't impose penalties or fines for failing to preregister a voter drive — New Mexico does, she said.
    "The main similarity is the effect — hampering, and, to some extent, shutting down voter registration," Weiser said in a phone interview.
    Volunteers are limited in New Mexico to 50 forms at a time without special dispensation from an election official. "They're tracked to you, and if you only turn in 49 forms, they're going to presume wrongdoing," she said.