NVRA/Motor Voter Heritage White Paper

My primer on the National Voter Registration Act published by the Heritage Foundation.  Abstract:

The National Voter Registration Act imposed sweeping changes on the conduct of American elections. These changes included significant federal mandates on state and local election officials that restricted the ability of those officials to maintain clean and accurate voter rolls while simultaneously obliging them to maintain clean and accurate voter rolls. For most of the history of the law, enforcement actions have been directed against election officials who sought to clean voter rolls and against states for insufficiently pushing voter registration among entitlement recipients. The U.S. Department of Justice, however, has refused to enforce the requirement that election officials maintain clean and accurate voter rolls. Only recently have private parties brought litigation to make up for DOJ’s failure.