DENVER—A voting advocacy group says Colorado hasn’t done a good job of registering people receiving public assistance, including food stamps and Medicaid.
Since 1995, the federal National Voter Registration Act has required that people applying for public assistance be told they can register to vote. It’s the same law that allows people to register when they get their driver’s license, which earned it the nickname “motor voter”.
Project Vote released a study Monday saying that the number of people registering through welfare offices has remained low overall and that figures vary widely from county to county. According to figures collected from the secretary of state, Project Vote said that while Denver offices registered 2,125 people in 2006, El Paso, Arapahoe and Weld counties didn’t report any people had registered to vote.
The figures show that 4,667 people registered to vote through county welfare offices in 2006 but the number of people who received services that year isn’t known, making it impossible to know the percentage of people who registered, said Michael Slater, deputy director of Project Vote.
One of the study’s authors, Douglas Hess, said he met with representatives from the secretary of state’s office last month and said they are taking steps to put together training for county workers as well as a new system to monitor compliance with the law.
Rich Coolidge, a spokesman for Secretary of State Mike Coffman, confirmed that the office is working on the issue.
“We are being proactive and working with state agencies, particularly Human Services, to ensure they are complying with NVRA,” he said in a written statement.
According to the study, there are about 900,000 unregistered Colorado residents and about one-third of them earn less than $25,000 and would likely be receiving some kind of public assistance.
