VA Tells Court It Can't Imagine Voter Registration Drives for Its Wounded Veterans and the Homeless

[babylonsister]

Why does the VA think their neutrality should trump a person's constitutional rights?



Veterans Affairs Tells Court It Can't Imagine Voter Registration Drives for Its Wounded Veterans and the Homeless

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet. Posted June 12, 2008.

The VA's attorney tells a federal appeals court that voters registration drives are a partisan distraction.


An attorney for the Department of Veterans Affairs, which runs hospitals and homeless shelters for veterans, told a federal appeals court Thursday that the VA could not conceive of any circumstance where voter registration drives could occur at its facilities.

"This is an activity that could be seen as harming the appearance of the VA's neutrality," said Owen Martikan, assistant U.S. attorney representing the agency, adding voter registration drives would interfere with patient medical care and also violate the federal Hatch Act, which limits federal employees from participating in political campaign activities.

"If you cure the problem of overt partisanship, you are creating another problem," Martikan said. "Once you let in someone else, you are not being neutral unless you let everyone in."

But Scott Rafferty, a Washington, D.C.-based attorney who has spent several years arguing the VA must allow voter registration drives to help wounded former soldiers register and vote, disagreed.

"Integrating veterans into the communities that they live in is the highest honor we can award veterans," Rafferty told the court.

The issue before a federal appeals court in San Francisco is whether restrictions on voter registration drives at the VA's campus in nearby Menlo Park are unconstitutional.

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http://www.alternet.org/democracy/88012/?ses=b3b2ab616ae2919a1d8545f8b71d0d7f

[babylonsister]

1. Not an issue for anyone? nt