Three weeks after hearing a challenge to the heart of the Voting Rights Act, the Supreme Court will decide another important voting rights case following oral arguments today in Arizona v. The Inter Tribal Council of Arizona. In 2004, Arizona voters approved Proposition 200, a stringent anti-immigration law that included provisions requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote and government-issued photo ID to cast a ballot. Last year, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit blocked the proof of citizenship requirement, which it said violated the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). Under the NVRA, those using a federal form to register to vote must affirm, under penalty of perjury, that they are US citizens. Twenty-eight million people used that federal form to register to vote in 2008. Arizona’s law, the court concluded, violated the NVRA by requiring additional documentation, such as a driver’s license, birth certificate, passport or tribal forms. According to a 2006 study by the Brennan Center for Justice, at least 7 percent of eligible voters “do not have ready access to the documents needed to prove citizenship.”
Prop 200 has had a chilling effect on voter registration in Arizona. “Following enactment of Proposition 200, over 31,000 individuals were rejected for voter registration in Arizona,” according to a brief by the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund (MALDEF). “Less than one-third of the rejected registrants subsequently successfully registered to vote.” The law has needlessly prevented eligible voters from registering and has made voter registration work more difficult. “The proportion of all voter registrations in [Phoenix’s] Maricopa County attributable to community-based drives decreased from 24% in 2004 to 7% in 2005, 5% in 2006 and 6% in 2007,” found MALDEF.
Prop 200 was aimed at curtailing illegal immigration but has harmed many legal Arizonians. Of the 31,500 citizens who were prevented from registering to vote, MALDEF found, “the record in the case demonstrates that the rejected…registrants were Democrats and Republicans in equal numbers, almost one-half were under the age of 30, and a majority of those who indicated a race said they were white.”
Supporters of Prop 200 claim the proof of citizenship requirement is needed to stop voter registration fraud. But as the appeals court found, “Arizona has not provided persuasive evidence that voter fraud in registration procedures is a significant problem in Arizona; moreover, the NVRA includes safeguards addressing voter fraud.” Adds Nina Perales, vice president of litigation at MALDEF: “Nobody has ever been prosecuted for using the federal form to register to vote as a non-citizen.” There have been only seven cases of alleged election fraud in Arizona since 2000, according to an exhaustive study by News21, and the two alleged instances of non-citizens voting were dismissed.
Full Article: Voting Rights Are Once Again Challenged at the Supreme Court | The Nation.