Swing-State Court Okays Disenfranchisement of Thousands

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                     Contact: Andrew Kirshenbaum, Program Associate Wednesday, October 20. 2004      (301) 270-4616 or [email protected]

TAKOMA PARK, Maryland ��� In the hotly contested state of Nevada, thousands of residents, despite acting to register to vote, will be denied their right to vote on election day. Because of the lack of a constitutionally protected right to vote, a county judge has decided their fate.

Earlier this month former employees of Voters Outreach of America, a voter registration organization, charged their former company with destroying voter registration cards of unsuspecting Nevadans who had registered as Democrats. These potential voters were never informed that their registration form was not processed. 

In an unsettling ruling, however, on Friday, October 15, 2004, Clark County District Judge Valerie Adair decided that victims of this civil rights breach would effectively have no remedy as they will not be allowed to re-register to vote. Her concern was that doing so might allow additional people to register whose forms had not been thrown out ��� in effect judge that administrative convenience trumped the right to vote.

���Before Judge Adair���s ruling, the only thing that had been destroyed were registration documents, but today we learn that actually these citizens��� rights to vote has been trashed as well���, commented Rob Richie, executive director of FairVote-The Center for Voting and Democracy. ���Many of these voters will only find out about this travesty on election day when they try to vote and without a way to have their provisional ballot counted.

The ability to cast a ballot should be a fundamental right of every U.S citizen. FairVote supports Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr���s proposed amendment (HJ Resolution 28) to the U.S. Constitution to guarantee that every U.S. citizen of voting age would be able to vote and have that vote correctly counted.