House Hearings Expose Voter Suppression by Department of Justice

Project Vote. Posted March 10, 2008.

February 26 was not a good day for Asheesh Agarwal, Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division of the U. S. Department of Justice. During a hearing of the House Committee on the Judiciary, the bookish bureaucrat was raked slowly over the hot coals by several irate members of Congress.

At issue was the DOJ's enforcement of key provisions within the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), which was passed by Congress in 1993 to increase participation in federal elections. Committee members attempted, with little success, to get Agarwal to explain why DOJ has spent the lion's share of its resources to pressure states to purge voters rather than ensuring their rights.

"Rights on paper are not the same as rights in fact," intoned Congressman Jerrold Nadler of New York. "For that we need vigorous enforcement."

Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Congresswoman from South Florida, cited alarming statistics about voter registration decreases documented in Unequal Access: Neglecting the National Voter Registration Act, 1995-2007, a report written by Project Vote and Demos. The report found that voter registrations generated from public assistance agencies within that period had declined by 79 percent, despite the NVRA's specific requirement that states offer the service in agencies that help the disadvantaged.

Wasserman Schultz noted that the Justice Department's Voting Rights Section had filed five lawsuits containing NVRA claims since 2006, but that four of the suits "were filed not to enhance voter registration opportunities, but instead to force states to conduct massive purges of their registration lists."

Agarwal attempted to explain that of ten NVRA-related suits the Bush administration has filed, two involved possible cases of voters being improperly removed from the registration rolls. He also noted that in late August, DOJ sent letters to 18 states seeking information "regarding their compliance or lack of compliance with Section 7 of the NVRA."

But the Congresswoman was having none of it. She pressed the Deputy Assistant Attorney General to explain why the department was concentrating on purging cases rather than easing registration.

"Much of that purging in recent years has been shown to be overly aggressive and purged voters that were valid and belonged on the roll," she argued. "If you're only pursing two Section 7 lawsuits and the others relate to purging voters from the rolls, I think one could logically conclude that you are more aggressively going after states to ensure that they purge. Is that the case?"

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