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Expert urges clearer legal definitions for 'uniform' and 'nondiscriminatory' in NVRA and HAVA
Summary
Professor Morley told the House Administration Committee that courts have reached different outcomes because the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act leave 'uniform' and 'nondiscriminatory' undefined; he recommended statutory definitions tied to similarly situated treatment and constitutional nondiscrimination principles.
Professor Morley told the House Administration Committee that two central phrases in the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) — "uniform" and "nondiscriminatory" — remain undefined in the statutes and that has produced inconsistent judicial interpretation.
"NVRA and HAVA ... require uniform and nondiscriminatory treatment of voters, but have left those two key terms, 'uniform' and 'nondiscriminatory,' undefined," Morley said. He described cases in which election officials, after receiving information suggesting a subset of voters might be ineligible, asked only those voters for additional information and were enjoined because the court found the officials had not treated similarly situated voters the same way.
Morley recommended defining "uniform" to mean that similarly situated voters are treated similarly, while preserving an official's ability to investigate a particular registrant when there is a specific reason to do so. He also proposed that "nondiscriminatory" be given independent meaning by linking it to the Constitution's prohibitions on discrimination, citing the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments as relevant markers for the term's legal scope.
Those definitions, Morley said, would help distinguish lawful, targeted eligibility checks from unlawful practices that single out groups of voters for additional procedures. He pointed to court injunctions that arose when some voters were asked for extra information while others were not, saying the cases illustrate the practical consequences of ambiguous statutory language.
The expert framed his recommendations as technical clarifications rather than calls for new enforcement mechanisms: clarifying what counts as "removal" or differential treatment, and spelling out limits on discriminatory targeting, would make the statutes easier for election officials and the courts to apply.
The committee did not take a vote on legislative language during the exchange; the discussion was limited to testimony and follow-up questioning.
