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Posts Tagged ‘registration’
August 16th, 2013 at 1:51 pm
ObamaCare’s Voter Registration Ploy Will Spawn Lawsuits

Democratic strongholds like California, Vermont and New York have been quick to use ObamaCare’s state-based insurance exchanges as an excuse to register voters.

State officials are claiming that 1993 National Voter Registration Act (aka the “Motor Voter Act”) requires combining election prospects with health insurance, but the reality is much murkier.

To start, ObamaCare is silent on voter registration. “The health care law spans 974 pages and regulates nearly one-fifth of our economy,” Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA) wrote in a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services, “yet nowhere in the law is voter registration mentioned.”

Then there’s the Motor Voter Act itself.

As written, the law “requires states to offer voter registration at government offices, most commonly departments of motor vehicles,” explains the Detroit Free Press. “With the exchanges, which are in some ways a new kind of government office, some are questioning whether the law applies to them.”

But unlike a state’s motor vehicles department, not all ObamaCare exchanges are standard government agencies. The paper continues, “In some states, the exchange will be a nonprofit; in others it will be part of the state’s health or human services agency. And in many Republican-controlled states, the federal government will operate the exchanges.”

The lack of uniformity is already leading to differing interpretations about whether the Motor Voter Act applies, which in turn is spawning lawsuits.

With this much uncertainty leading to costly court battles, states and their taxpayers would be much better served leaving the question whether Motor Voter applies to ObamaCare for academics to debate.

The alternative is an expensive and unnecessary distraction.

December 15th, 2011 at 12:23 pm
Holder Says Govt. Has Responsibility to Automatically Register Voters

As an addendum to my column on Eric Holder’s disastrous tenure as U.S. Attorney General, the AG was kind enough to deliver a speech on the Voting Rights Act in Austin, TX, Tuesday night.  Though Holder castigated two Republican examples of voter fraud – both of which were swiftly remedied by the Justice Department – he (unsurprisingly) failed to mention any investigation into the well-documented voter fraud conducted by supporters of Tim Johnson (D-SD) and Al Franken (D-MN) during their successful bids for U.S. Senate.

Omissions aside, Holder made an all-too-typical argument: claiming for government the privilege of taking yet another activity away from otherwise responsible adults.  Here’s Holder’s take:

All eligible citizens can and should be automatically registered to vote.   The ability to vote is a right – it is not a privilege.   Under our current system, many voters must follow cumbersome and needlessly complex voter registration rules.   And every election season, state and local officials have to manually process a crush of new applications – most of them handwritten – leaving the system riddled with errors, and, too often, creating chaos at the polls.

Fortunately, modern technology provides a straightforward fix for these problems – if we have the political will to bring our election systems into the 21st century.   It should be the government’s responsibility to automatically register citizens to vote, by compiling – from databases that already exist – a list of all eligible residents in each jurisdiction.   Of course, these lists would be used solely to administer elections – and would protect essential privacy rights.

So Holder thinks that overburdened, cash-strapped governments can extract accurate registration data while protecting each individual’s privacy rights.  (You trust, Big Sis, don’t you?)  He thinks that registering to vote and casting a ballot are so important that ordinary citizens can’t be counted on to do the process themselves.  And he believes, along with his liberal activist friends at the ACLU and ACORN, that the reason for low voter turnout after decades of federal approval of political map drawing, “public interest” lawsuits filling the court system, and Motor Voter laws that automatically register licensed drivers to vote is not enough government control over who votes and how often.

You’ve got to hand it to big government liberals like Holder: at least he’s consistent.