By The Editors

A major march for voting rights in 1965

Testifying Wednesday, March 11, before a U.S. Senate committee, Kristen Clarke, an NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) attorney, said that the primary and general election campaigns leading up to the 2008 election underscored that numerous problems still undermine many citizens’ efforts to register to vote.

Those problems have a particularly negative effect on black and other minority voters, said Clarke, Co-Director of the LDF Political Participation Practice Group. It is critical, she continued, that corrective action be taken in order to ensure that all those in future elections who wish to cast a vote have the opportunity to do so.

Clarke said the problems included voter purge programs, which led to a substantial number of voters being removed from the rolls; disparate practices among local election officials in processing voter registration forms; varied approaches in implementing the Help America Vote Act’s (HAVA) database matching requirements; and confusion surrounding registration for persons with felony convictions.

“Given these problems,” Clarke told the Senate Committee on Rules and Administrations, “the challenge we now face is determining how to reform and repair the system in a way that will be more inclusive and provide affirmative opportunities for broad and meaningful participation to the millions of eligible but not yet registered citizens throughout our country.”

Clarke’s testimony came on the same day a study of the 2008 election process by a consortium of scholars who specialize in voting issues declared that as many as nine million citizens who were eligible to vote in November did not, due to registration problems, their failure to receive absentee ballots, or their being “discouraged” from voting by various administrative roadblocks.

• View Kristen Clarke’s testimony and an executive summary
• Read how hurdles to voting persisted in 2008 from The New York Times