They don’t want the plebs to vote
Another potential political hurdle is the uncertainty that comes with automatically registering eligible voters who may then make election outcomes less predictable.
“If you don’t want increased political participation by low-income people because you don’t know what that might mean for the votes that you get or the votes that members of your party get, you really may not be interested in this,” Michener says.
That quote is in the context of GOP criticism and legal action aimed at Biden’s previous attempts to expand Medicaid voter registration though.
Biden’s previous attempts to expand Medicaid voter registration
Please read the article if you’re going to comment, the whole thing is about how there have not been any efforts like that in spite of state governments begging for them
The GOP legal action you’re thinking of was against an executive order Biden issued telling federal agencies to look at what they could do to support voter registration and report back to him and to make sure their websites were up to fate, but that was the end of it. He has not made attempts to establish Medicaid voter registration, he won’t even commit to being in favor of it.
Asked whether Biden supports these automatic voter registration proposals, the White House’s press office referred NPR’s questions to CMS’ parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services.
… In a statement to NPR, Sara Lonardo, a spokesperson for HHS, said that “CMS continues to actively explore” adding the question in time for the next open enrollment period, which begins on Nov. 1, four days before the last day of voting for this year’s general elections.
For someone who’s mad that I supposedly didn’t read the article, it sounds like you didn’t read the article
I mean, that’s one possible theory. That same professor speculates a paragraph or two earlier that maybe Biden’s avoided doing this because dumbass moderates who pay attention to politics for about five minutes every year could view it as a power grab (which I really think we ought to be able to message through, but either way the point is this is one of a few theories).
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Despite multiple inquiries from members of Congress over the past two years, Biden officials have yet to weigh in on plans for using Medicaid application information to automatically register eligible voters when they sign up for the government-sponsored health insurance.
And I think it’s time to sort of admit that the way we’ve been doing NVRA compliance is not working anymore," says Sam Oliker-Friedland, a former voting rights litigator at the Justice Department who now heads the Institute for Responsive Government, which recently led a letter calling for the Biden administration to support automatic voter registration at Medicaid offices.
The information needed to register a voter — including their name, address, date of birth and verification of U.S. citizenship — is also collected when most adults apply for Medicaid benefits, a process that typically has to happen every year.
Asked whether Biden supports these automatic voter registration proposals, the White House’s press office referred NPR’s questions to CMS’ parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services.
The Biden executive order’s call for more action has drawn criticism from Republicans, including on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, which has been pushing federal agencies to release more information about how they are promoting voter registration.
In Pennsylvania, a group of more than two dozen Republican state lawmakers represented by the America First Policy Institute — which is run by former Trump administration officials — recently filed a federal lawsuit that claims Biden’s executive order is unconstitutional.
The original article contains 1,650 words, the summary contains 247 words. Saved 85%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
