Disability Rights Nebraska says proposal would affect its registration work

Amy Miller drives across Nebraska as an attorney with Disability Rights Nebraska, visiting nursing homes and assisted living facilities to investigate the quality of care. During those visits, as she reminds residents how they can report abuse or neglect, she also offers voter registration forms. Last month, she helped a veteran with a traumatic brain injury fill out change-of-address paperwork so he could vote in the upcoming midterm elections. “He 100% knew who he wanted to vote for,” Miller said, but he struggled to write with a pen.

Miller, who has worked at the nonprofit for six years, said she had never faced regulators wanting to impede that work. “Shutting that down and making it more difficult for these Americans to access the ballot box is bewildering to me,” she said.

Congress funds Disability Rights Nebraska’s efforts to ensure that even people who might not have access to the internet or transportation have the opportunity to participate in elections.

The OMB proposal would bar any recipient of federal grant money from using those funds for voter registration drives or “related activities,” a phrase the draft does not define. Neither Vought nor his office responded to questions about the proposed change.

Vought has long argued against using taxpayer money for voter registration efforts. In a 2022 letter to state officials, he called a Biden-era executive order on voter registration a “power grab” that would “increase voter registration and turnout, especially among Democratic Party supporters.” Since taking office, Vought has used his position to cancel, freeze or redirect large amounts of federal funding contrary to congressional orders.

Rule follows a series of administration actions on registration

The draft OMB proposal is part of an extensive effort to rewrite the rules governing federal grants. It also comes after a series of Trump administration actions on voter registration, including the president’s call for the SAVE America Act, a bill that would require people to provide documents proving their citizenship to register to vote and may require in-person delivery of that proof, a requirement that would effectively end voter registration drives.

Last year, the administration banned nongovernmental organizations from conducting registration drives at naturalization ceremonies, a ban that was temporarily lifted amid litigation. The Department of Education sent a letter to colleges and universities stating they could not use federal work-study dollars for voting-related work, a directive that has also been contested; previously, those funds had been used to pay students with part-time jobs to conduct voter registration on campus and in neighboring communities. On the first day of his second term, Trump rescinded an executive order signed by Joe Biden that had directed federal agencies to expand registration opportunities and acknowledged that Black Americans and people with disabilities face historic barriers to voting access.

2002 law funds 57 nonprofits serving every state

In 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, signed by President George W. Bush, in response to the contested 2000 presidential election. The law created grants to help people with disabilities register to vote, cast ballots and access polling places. Congress has budgeted $10 million a year for the program, divided among 57 nonprofit groups that together cover every state, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, Native American communities and U.S. territories.

An April 2024 report from Rutgers University’s Program for Disability Research, written for the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission, found that the funding had narrowed the gap in ballot-casting between voters with and without disabilities.

Registration gaps remain. During the 2024 election, 3.6% of registered voters with disabilities reported difficulties with voter registration, compared with 1.4% of registered voters without disabilities, according to Rutgers survey data. The difference is small but statistically significant and represents the experiences of about 740,000 registered voters with disabilities, said Douglas Kruse, one of the Rutgers professors who compiled the survey.

National Voter Registration Act would compound the impact

Nonprofits that receive federal funds to help people sign up for Medicaid, food stamps or other programs covered by the National Voter Registration Act are already required to provide registration forms and help people fill them out. If the OMB rule is finalized, those groups would face contradictory federal directives.

Thousands of additional nonprofits receive federal funds for other services but conduct voter outreach using private donations. Nonprofit experts told ProPublica that confusion over which groups the proposed ban covers, and the burden of proving compliance, could lead many organizations to pause or scale back registration efforts ahead of the 2028 presidential election. Colleges that help students register to vote while away from home could be similarly affected.

Once OMB publishes a final rule, it will almost certainly be subject to litigation, legal experts said. They predicted lawsuits would focus on how the rule contradicts existing statutes, including the grants Congress created in the Help America Vote Act and has repeatedly renewed.

Samuel Bagenstos, who served as general counsel of OMB during part of Biden’s administration and is now a law professor at the University of Michigan specializing in disability and appropriations law, said the proposal disregards Congress’s constitutional “power of the purse.” The legislative branch sets the budget and gives federal agencies instructions on distributing those funds; the agencies then write detailed policies to select grant recipients and get the money out the door.

“Vought understands that federal funding provides a tool to consolidate power into the White House,” Bagenstos said. “This is not even a surgical power grab. It’s just a massive across-the-board power grab.”

Rabia Belt, a Stanford law professor who studies disability and citizenship, said she did not think the rule’s authors set out to disenfranchise voters with disabilities. “I don’t really think this rule had in mind that we are going to disenfranchise voters with disabilities. But it’s going to have that kind of effect,” she said.

Nebraska nonprofit submits formal opposition

Disability Rights Nebraska, which was awarded $141,000 in voter accessibility funds this year, submitted a public comment opposing the rule. The change “would affect the ability of nonprofits such as ours to conduct” voter registration drives, which are “an invaluable service to Nebraskans with disabilities who are otherwise locked out of the voting experience,” the organization wrote.

The group’s work is strictly nonpartisan as required by law, the comment said. During a visit in June to a rural assisted living facility, 30% of the new voters the staff helped register identified as Republican, 20% as Democrat and 50% as nonpartisan or affiliated with a third party. To keep registration drives nonpartisan, Miller said she and her colleagues conduct the work in pairs, with each staffer representing a different party, as the law requires.

Miller described one encounter at a rural facility in early 2024 in a community so small it had no library or gas station, with the nearest election commissioner’s office a 30-minute drive away. A young man in a baggy T-shirt pointed at a poster the group had put up inside the building about voting access for people with disabilities. “Is this true?” he asked. Miller said yes. “So I could register?” the man asked. “You can,” Miller replied. “Do you want to register?”

He did. Miller said she knew what party the man wanted to register with, though she declined to identify the party publicly or give personal details about him to respect his privacy. Miller said the man told her he had lived at the home for a couple of years and this was the first time someone had offered to walk him through the registration process. She said she wished the politicians making rules about voting rights could witness such moments. “If I could just bring a politician with me to stand in the front hall of a nursing home” and see how people react when they realize they can vote again, she said, “I wish they could see that and realize how important the work is.”

The draft version of the OMB proposal was published in May.