State asked to try harder to register more voters.

Byline: David Steves The Register-Guard

Oregon's social services agency is stepping up its efforts to comply with federal law by handing out voter registration cards to people seeking public assistance.

The Department of Human Services scheduled training for employees later this month after it became one of dozens of states targeted in a national effort to boost state agencies' compliance with the National Voter Registration Act.

The nonpartisan organizations Demos and Project Vote faulted Oregon and other states for failing to fully comply with the law, passed by Congress in 1993 to help make voter registration easier. The two voters' rights groups also asked the U.S. Department of Justice to take action to improve states' compliance with the law.

Cindy Becker, deputy DHS director, acknowledged that for more than a decade the department has taken an overly "passive" approach to complying with the law by simply mailing registration cards to applicants for public services.

She said the department learned during a July meeting with Project Vote representatives that that didn't fully comply with the law.

"What they told us is, that's not compliant. You can't be passive. You have to be proactive," she said.

The employee training will be done in late September. DHS workers will be instructed to pass out registration cards personally in field office waiting rooms and to offer to turn in cards for those who want to register to vote.

Chuck Sheketoff, who runs a think tank that promotes policies supporting poor and working families, said the training has been scheduled so late it's doubtful many public services applicants will be able to register to vote before the Oct. 12 deadline for the Nov. 2 presidential election.

"It's pretty pitiful that they're so behind the times," said Sheketoff, executive director of the Oregon Center for Public Policy. "I mean, this law has been on the books for more than a decade."

Becker acknowledged that the timing of the stepped-up registration effort could have been better. "It's going to be late, but we found out about it late," she said.

DHS actually has registered voters at a rate above the national average. In 2001-02, people applying for public assistance accounted for 6.7 percent of newly registered voters; nationally, the rate was 2.1 percent, according to Demos calculations based on government data.

But Tim Rusch, a Demos spokesman, said the national figure is artificially low because several states have completely ignored the voting act requirement that public assistance agencies give registration forms to anyone who comes into their offices for services "and at least give them the option" of becoming voters.

Rusch said other states have done much better.

In Nevada during 2001-02, 19.3 percent of newly registered voters were welfare applicants, he said. And in Washington state, 1,700 new voters were registered from among people applying for public assistance in a four-week period after Gov. Gary Locke in late July directed all state agencies to step up efforts to comply with the voter registration law.

Nationally, fewer than 60 percent of citizens in households earning $25,000 or less annually say they are registered to vote, according to Demos and Project Vote. The rate jumps to more than 80 percent for citizens in households earning more than $75,000 per year, the groups said.

Rusch said it's important to boost election participation among people who are struggling economically.

"The people with the most to lose in an election are people in this demographic, people who have lost their job, lost their health care," he said.