Some people just refuse to accept good news.
Take voter registrations at state welfare offices. They’ve plummeted since 1997. No surprise there: The decline has occurred as the number of people on welfare has dropped. Most people would consider that a good thing. Yet some proponents of voting rights for the poor believe something sinister is at play.
Unfortunately for them, the evidence indicates otherwise. We know because we’ve run the numbers.
In 1994, Congress passed the “Motor Voter Act” (officially called the National Voter Registration Act). In addition to mandating that states let people register to vote at motor vehicle departments, the states also had to offer voter registration forms at welfare offices. This requirement was supposed to increase voting by the poor.
Recent reports by Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), Demos, and Project Vote, three organizations devoted to voting rights advocacy, claim that voter registrations from welfare offices have declined drastically in recent years. (While we’re on the subject, several ACORN employees were convicted in federal court in 2007 for committing voter registration fraud during recent voter registration drives funded by Project Vote.)
Demos and Project Vote found that voter registrations at welfare offices declined by 79 percent from 1995-1996 to 2005-2006. (The data are reported by the states to the federal government in two-year intervals.) This finding, however, doesn’t explain why registrations decreased. Moreover, it doesn’t control for factors that influence voter registration rates. These groups paint the decline as a result of the states denying welfare recipients the opportunity to register to vote at welfare offices.
Further, Demos and Project Vote only focus on the decline in welfare office voter registrations that has occurred during the Bush administration. They rebuke the U.S. Department of Justice for failing to take their advice to open official investigations into the decline.
However, these groups were silent when the largest drop in welfare office voter registration occurred during the Clinton administration. Average state public assistance registrations dropped from 115,177 in 1995-1996 to 53,552 in 1997-1998 — a decline of 54 percent. In terms of raw magnitude, this average decline of 61,625 registrations is the largest drop since the registration data has been collected.
The reason for the decline is simple, of course: welfare reform.
The 1996 reform, a landmark change in our nation’s welfare policy, required many recipients to work in exchange for benefits. Research by June E. O’Neill and M. Anne Hill of Baruch College strongly suggests that welfare reform accounts for more than half of the decline in assistance to single mothers during the 1990s. Welfare reform led to a substantial decrease in welfare caseloads, which, in turn, would lead to fewer voters registering at public assistance offices.
Indeed, the decline in voter registrations closely follows the decline in welfare participation. The association between welfare caseloads and voter registrations seems obvious, but a 2005 report by Demos, ACORN and Project Vote claims: “While caseloads in some public assistance programs have declined overall since the NVRA went into effect, these declines are not sufficient to explain the declines in voter registration applications through public assistance agencies.”
Further, the 2008 report by Project Vote and Demos rejects any possibility that changes in welfare caseloads may help explain the decline in public-assistance voter registrations. As evidence, they note that because participation in the Food Stamp program has increased in recent years, welfare reform has had no role in the decline in voter registrations at welfare offices.
We analyzed the effect of declining welfare caseloads on welfare office voter registrations across the 50 states and the District of Columbia from 1995 to 2006. After accounting for socio-economic factors, participation in other welfare programs, and political election cycles, AFDC/TANF caseloads has a statistically measurable effect in reducing voter registrations at welfare offices.
Our research found that a one-percent decrease in AFDC/TANF participation is associated with a 0.49 percent decline in voter registrations. It seems obvious: Fewer people on welfare means fewer people registering to vote at welfare offices.
Our study also controlled for changes in Food Stamp and Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) participation. Changes in the participation rates of these programs failed to have a statistically measurable effect on welfare office voter registrations.
For the election cycle variables, presidential and gubernatorial election years have statistically significant and positive associations with welfare office voter registrations. During presidential and gubernatorial election years, registrations increased by 0.08 percent and 0.04 percent, respectively. Senate and off-year congressional elections appear to have no statistically measurable influence on registrations.
While the number of voter registrations at welfare offices has declined, that doesn’t mean former welfare recipients aren’t registering. Low-income Americans have numerous and easy opportunities to register, as all Americans do. For years we have had the opportunity to register to vote through the mail, at motor vehicle offices and other locations. In addition, numerous “voting rights” and “community mobilization” groups, along with political parties, are actively engaged in making sure their constituents are registered.
Welfare reform made a substantial contribution to the decrease in public assistance voter registrations. That’s what the statistics show, and it’s good news. In this presidential election year, that’s worth remembering, and celebrating.
– David B. Muhlhausen, Ph.D., is a Senior Policy Analyst and Patrick Tyrrell is a researcher in the Center for Data Analysis at The Heritage Foundation.