The debate over a new law illustrates the messiness that has accompanied some voter registration efforts.
LeMoyne-Owen College student Franky Mills collects high-fives from fellow students during a get-out-the-vote drive at an early-voting location in Memphis on Nov. 1. By Amy Gardner Amy Gardner National political reporter Email Bio Follow May 24 at 7:50 AM Last year, an army of paid workers with stacks of voter registration forms fanned out in Memphis, Nashville and other parts of Tennessee to persuade African Americans to vote.
He proposed a solution that went further than any other state in the nation: imposing civil penalties on groups that employ paid canvassers if they submit incomplete or inaccurate voter registration forms. There is no definitive account of what exactly went wrong in Tennessee last year. Republicans, who control all arms of the government — including the state and county election commissions — did not formally investigate the matter before moving to pass the new law. As a result, there is no official account of how many applications were faulty, the source of the problems and whether the Tennessee Black Voter Project was to blame.
“They have created more administrative hurdles to make it harder to vote,” said Charlane Oliver, a co-founder of the Equity Alliance, one of the partners of the Tennessee Black Voter Project. “And that’s exactly what they want. They don’t want black people to vote.”Through a spokeswoman, Goins and his boss, Secretary of State Tre Hargett, declined requests for interviews, citing ongoing litigation. The office of Lee, the governor, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
As the state’s Oct. 9 registration deadline approached, Phillips said thousands of forms were submitted. “We were working 12- to 18-hour shifts,” Phillips recalled. “At one point I and my supervisors didn’t have a day off for 45 days. The burden that it placed on us literally was going to prevent us from doing our job. I thought my assistant was going to crawl under her desk and sob.”
Oliver said the Tennessee Black Voter project had sought guidance ahead of time from local election officials and warned them of the volume of forms coming. “It became a situation where it was very dangerous for other individuals who were properly trying to register, because we were so backlogged,” Goins told lawmakers.Republican state Rep. Tim Rudd, one of the bill’s sponsors, repeated the claim that some drives were paying canvassers by the form when he introduced the bill in a committee hearing in March. “So they were just signing people up and flooding them,” he said. “So this is an effort to clean that up.
Goins did not say how many attempts to register a dead person occurred in the fall. Phillips said she knew of two or three instances in Shelby County. Roberts, in Davidson County, said he was aware of one dead person showing up on a form. He noted that such instances are not necessarily fraud and could result from using a wrong Social Security number.
“This is how they suppress the vote,” Oliver said. “You can’t sit here and tell me this is about election integrity. It’s not. This is about keeping black people in their place. We caught them off guard, and now they have to come up with a law to stifle that energy and that effort.” Siju Crawford signs in at a voter registration table at an Up the Vote Block Party on Oct. 31 at the First Baptist Church in Memphis Most of the evidence cited in legislative hearings was about Shelby, but Goins also said that problems occurred elsewhere in the state, including Davidson and Knox counties.
In Shelby County, 56 percent of forms submitted last year resulted in registrations — slightly higher than the statewide average. In Knox it was 54 percent, and in Davidson, it was 43 percent. But Marion Ott, president of the League of Women Voters of Tennessee, said in testimony before a state Senate committee that she worried that the league — a nonprofit that receives grants and sometimes pays people to help with voter registration — could also be affected by the measure.
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