Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act, which imposed the requirement, in 1993. But after these agencies registered 2.6 million people to vote in 1995-1996, the total registered plunged to about 1 million in 2003-2004.
Michael Slater, the Oregon-based deputy director of the national registration group Project Vote, said officials of the Justice Department's civil rights division showed little interest in enforcing that part of the law.
Officials for the three groups, as well as former lawyers in the division, cite the inaction by the Justice Department as further evidence that politics drove the Bush administration's operation of the nation's chief law enforcement agency.
The Bush Justice Department, they said, has largely ignored the voter registration sections of the law while aggressively using a narrower provision to sue or threaten to sue states that have failed to purge the names of allegedly ineligible people from voter rolls.
Such selective enforcement, in effect, benefits Republican candidates at election time.
You see they used the laws to make sure there were fewer Dem voters and made it appear as though this typoe of vote fraud was a problem.
It has been roundly regected as any threat to the outcome of elections and is next to non exsistant YET the other law was a very sucessful way of getting people to go and vote.
They completely ignored the law because the result was most of the people registared to vote in this method were poor ,of color and mostly Dem.
Yes folks this may have very well effects real elections.
