Full transcript of phone interview with Nina Perales, Southwest Regional Counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, and lead counsel for plaintiffs in Gonzales v. Arizona. Perales spoke about the case with News21 on July 14, 2008.
Why is MALDEF pursuing this case?
MALDEF is pursuing case on behalf of its clients because Prop. 200 has had an unconstitutional negative effect on registration and voting in Arizona since it was put into effect. And the clients we have, have been prevented from voting, or been forced to go through unnecessary extra steps for voting, and that’s why we’re involved in the case.
Does Prop 200 make it more difficult for naturalized citizens to vote?
One of basic issues that been a problem with Prop 200, is on voter ID side a lot of people who have valid current ID have been blocked from voting because of bad implementation of the law. So, for example, one of our clients, who’s name Georgia Morrison Flores, is married woman, who changed her name when she got married. And her driver’s license, although it is current and valid, and has her picture on it, and it’s definitely her, has a slightly different arrangement of last names than the voter rolls have. And for that reason she’s been prevented from voting in both the 2006 general election that was held in November 2006, as well as the February 5, Super Tuesday Arizona presidential preference election.
Does Gonzalez v. Arizona show how Prop 200 singles out naturalized citizens who want to vote?
Yes. We have our lead client in fact, Mr. Gonzales, was barred from voting because of the way Prop 200 sets up its proof of citizenship system. Prop 200, although it purports to require POC from everybody who’s registering to vote, actually singles out US citizens who gain their citizenship through naturalization for a more difficult registration process. And Mr. Gonzalez who tried to register to vote the day he took his oath of citizenship in 2005 is one of the people who’s been caught up in this system that specifically singles out naturalized citizens for a different process.
What is the impact of Prop 200 on voter registration in Arizona?
Well, Prop 200 carves out naturalized citizens for different process in couple of different ways. One way is that if you’re a native born person – or if you happen to be one of a rather small minority of people who have a U.S. passport – you’re allowed to register by photocopying your passport or your birth certificate – and mailing that to the county recorder. People who rely on their naturalization certificate to prove their U.S. citizenship – obviously anybody with a naturalization certificate is not born in the U.S. and doesn’t have a U.S. birth certificate - that person is not allowed to photocopy their naturalization certificate and mail it to the county recorder. That person is going to be required to bring the document in and register to vote in person, which is different from other folks. There’s another way that Prop 200 singles out naturalized citizens in that it says you can use your number of your certificate of naturalization to register to vote, write it on the form and mail it in. However, you won’t be added to the voter rolls until the county recorder confirms the number on your naturalization certificate with federal authorities. And, the part of the system that is discriminatory towards naturalized citizens is it’s not possible for county recorders to verify the naturalization certification number with the Department of Homeland Security. That’s not a number that Homeland Security tracks for people. So everybody who follows the directions under Prop 200 and writes down the number of their naturalization certificate is always and automatically rejected for voter registration and then are asked to make another application. That’s what happened to Mr. Gonzales.
Has he been able to overcome these challenges and register to vote during the time that you’ve contacted him and the case has been pending?
No, he has not been able to register to vote. After he took the oath of citizenship and became a U.S. citizen, he registered to vote that very day, filled out a form, followed the directions correctly, put down the number of his naturalization certificate, which he had in his hand because he had just stepped out of the ceremony. He was then automatically rejected for voter registration and told he had to reapply. Some months later he made a second registration application. This time, his daughter helped him go on Internet, and try to register to vote that way, using his driver’s license. Unfortunately, because his drivers license was issued before 1996, which isn’t that uncommon in Arizona, he wasn’t able to use it for voter registration because Prop 200 only lets you use a drivers license from after 1996 to register to vote. And so, Mr. Gonzales has applied twice, he did everything right, he’s been rejected twice, and at this point he is not registered to vote.
How has prop 200 impacted immigrants and the Latino community?
Stepping back from whether or not it’s impacted the Latino community, one of the important things to note is it had devastating impact on voter registration across the board. 38,000 voter registration applications have been rejected for failure to provide proof of citizenship under Prop 200 since it went into effect in January of 2005. So that’s 38,000 forms that would have been accepted for voter registration. They’re sworn, they’re properly filled out, they’ve got everything they need on them but for failure to prove documentary proof of citizenship. So it’s had an enormous impact on voter registration. I cannot think of another law in my memory that caused this many rejections in this short span of time. And what’s really frustrating about it for anybody who believes in voting is that these are folks who took time to fill out the registration form. You know, sometimes it’s hard to motivate people to register to vote. These are all forms that reflect individuals who wanted to register to vote, who took the time to register to vote, filled out the form completely, swore it out under penalty of perjury, and weren’t allowed to register.
The overwhelming majority of the 38,000 reflect the demographics of Arizona, in general. Meaning, they’re majority non-Hispanic, and almost over 90 percent of them were born in United States as they indicated on the forms. So it’s had a huge, broad negative impact. Then, with respect to the Latinos who’ve been rejected for voter registration, yes, it is disproportionately high compared to Latino’s proportion in the state.
What was the motivation behind the passage of Prop 200?
I don’t know really know what the motivation was of the people who drafted Proposition 200. I know that proposition 200, itself, on its face, is very focused on issues related to persons born outside the United States, foreign-born persons. The findings and declaration of the Act mention immigration and immigration enforcement, immigration control about 8 times in a very short span. So clearly, the focus of Prop 200 is on persons born outside the Untied States who are coming into the United States to make their home. With respect to the voter registration piece of Prop 200, because of course it was a much broader law, which had to do with other things, like public benefits. But just focusing in on the voter registration part of it, it is clear from the face of the statute that naturalized citizens are defined out as a distinct group of people who are subjected to different requirements for voter registration. And so, from the face of the statute, although we can’t say what exactly was in the minds or the hearts of the people who drafted it, from the face of the statute, I think we see that its intended to define a different path of voter registration for those who are foreign born U.S. citizens.
Were the majority of rejected applications from Latinos?
Well, we can only go off the forms themselves, and the information that we have and the forms for that information. We do know, because we looked at Spanish surnames, we do know have a sense of how many are Latino, and as I mentioned before, a minority of rejected voters are Latino, but its disproportionately high for the Latino presence in Arizona. With respect to foreign born, there are about 27,000, I believe, rejected voter registration applications from persons who indicated in the box – where were you born - that they were born outside the US. And then, of that group, you really have to go by hand through the forms to figure out how many relied on their naturalization certificate, as opposed to relying on some other proof of citizenship.
Right now, were focusing on the rejected forms themselves, because they’re paper evidence of those people who have been registered in the absence of prop 200. And these 38,000 reject people whose applications were otherwise fine and who swore out their citizenship under penalty of perjury. So this group is really the group we’re focusing on for the analysis. But, if you look at the trends in voter registration in Arizona, they do go up and down with people’s interest in elections. So, you see voter registration flow kind of rising and falling with even years when there are federal elections. So in this general pattern of kind of rising and falling, you would expect to see a steady upward movement in voter registration because Arizona is a growing state. And we’re not really seeing that pattern in the wake of Prop 200. Some of the evidence in the case breaks out voter registrations by how people registered – whether it was on paper, whether it was on internet, and there you see a very dramatic decline in the number of voter registrations that are happening through the mail forms, through the mail. It’s important to note, this doesn’t encompass the people who log on the Internet and try to register through the Internet. If you don’t have the proof of citizenship on your drivers license the way its been defined by Prop 200, and you try to register on the internet, the system basically kicks you out after it looks at your drivers license number and figures out if you’re before or after 1996. So like Mr. Gonzalez, he went on the Internet, he was putting in all his information. He put in his drivers license number and the computer checked that against the motor vehicles department and said oh, you’re from before 1996, I can’t register you online, and basically poured him out. We do not have record of how many people that’s happening to. So although we’re focused on the mail forms are focus, that’s only a piece of picture.
What will you do if Judge Roslyn Silver upholds your challenge to Proposition 200 in the Arizona Federal District Court?
If the judge upholds Prop 200 in every respect, I think the next step is for people to sit down and think about whether the case ought to be appealed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
If other states passed similar Proposition 200 legislation, what consequences would you expect?
I think if states pass documentary proof of citizenship laws for voter registration like Arizona has, and mind you Arizona is the only state right now that has that, they’re going to face similar very large numbers of rejections of voter registration applications. Historically, we’ve been moving towards having voter occur on paper, through the mail, through the internet, as way of making registration more accessible to people. If we go back to a system where folks have to register in person, where folks have to travel to the county seat with their documents in their hands, we’re really returning to a much earlier time before Civil Rights Acts and before the liberalization of registration. And I think we will see a commensurate restriction in the number of people registering to vote.
What about the specific impact on Latino voters?
If you make voter registration harder, it will necessarily fall harder on the Latino community, most of which is born in the United States, but because of past discrimination, may not have a strong history of voting in the family. So for example, in the Southwest, where there were a lot of mechanisms to prevent Latinos from voting, including poll tax and literacy tests. You may have native-born Latinos who may be the first or second person in their family who are registering to vote. I think when you put barriers up at that stage you can have a really strong effect on whether or not Latinos are registering to vote. Similarly, if you make it more difficult for naturalized citizens to register, there is going to be a very strong impact on Latino communities as well as on the Asian American community.
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