Good result from ACORN lawsuit

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2:37 PM Friday, December 11, 2009

ACORN did a good thing.

Back in 2006, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now filed a lawsuit to get Ohio to really enforce a federal law. That law requires states to offer voter registration assistance to people who do business with state agencies.

At the time, the basic complaint of ACORN, a self-proclaimed advocate for the poor, was that Ohio agencies that serve poor people weren’t fully complying with the law. The Ohio Department of Job and Family Services was a target of the suit, along with then-Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, whose job made him responsible for enforcing the act, ACORN said.

The Job and Family Services Department argued that the workers who come into contact with most clients are employed by counties, so the burden should be on counties.

The ACORN suit was thrown out of court at the time, but was reinstated by a federal appellate court a year ago. Now, with different people in state office, Ohio has settled with ACORN, accepting the thrust of its complaint.

The state promises to have front-line workers trained to help clients complete their registrations. The workers will be equipped with the necessary information in their computers. The registration forms will be included with other forms given to clients.

ACORN says this could result in hundreds of thousands of new registrations. It bases that judgment partly on similar victories elsewhere.

How many of the new registrants would actually vote is another question. Perhaps not many, given that we’re talking about people who were not necessarily motivated to take the trouble to register. But in certain high-intensity elections — like the presidential one in 2008 — they might go to the polls.

Even as this case was being settled, Ohio was considering other reforms to its registration system — most important, making registration an automatic result of, say, getting a driver’s license. But that kind of change requires the legislature to act.

The ACORN settlement is about changes that can be made administratively.

ACORN has come in for a lot of criticism lately, some justified, some overblown. It has been widely portrayed by frenetic right-wing warriors as a menace to society. So when it does something useful, that should be noted.

Whatever the impact of the settlement, there’s no question but that the new arrangement is the way the federal law is supposed to work. The idea — referred to as Motor Voter — was never simply to allow registration at public agencies. It was to reach out.

Some people take offense at the idea of the state reaching out. They say citizens ought to take the initiative of getting themselves registered. In truth, though, the registration system in most states is unnecessarily burdensome. The whole idea of pre-election registration has been found by some states and other countries to be unnecessary.

The government certainly shouldn’t resist reform solely on the premise that burdens on citizens are a good thing. That’s the worst kind of big government: totally gratuitous.

Cox News Service

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