Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez today spoke to the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) and the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) about the Civil Rights Division’s efforts to protect voting rights. Both groups, which are made up of Secretaries of State and Election Officials from the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, were in Washington for their 2011 winter conferences. Assistant Attorney General Perez spoke about the Department’s efforts to protect voters during the 2010 election cycle, including enforcement of the 2009 Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act. He also discussed other areas of the Division’s voting rights work, including preparation for the decennial redistricting process. The Assistant Attorney General told both audiences that the Civil Rights Division is dedicated to enforcing all of the civil rights laws in its jurisdiction in a swift, aggressive and evenhanded manner.

Earlier this week, Assistant Attorney General Perez delivered remarks at the Overseas Vote Foundation’s fifth annual Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act Summit in Washington, D.C. He spoke specifically about the Department’s efforts to enforce the MOVE Act. In the months leading up to the 2010 general election in November, the Department monitored every state for compliance with the MOVE Act, and took enforcement actions in 14 jurisdictions, including 11 states, 2 territories and the District of Columbia.

Assistant Attorney General Perez also addressed the National Association of Latino Elected Officials (NALEO) Institute on Redistricting earlier this week. NALEO is a non-partisan leadership organization made up of more than 6,000 Latino elected and appointed officials from across the country. He spoke about the redistricting process that follows each decennial Census and the Department’s efforts to prepare for the 2011 round of redistricting. Assistant Attorney General Perez said:

“The Civil Rights Division’s interest is simple: that the redistricting does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in a protected language minority group.”

The Division’s 2011 guidance on redistricting and Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act was published on Wednesday.

The following post originally appeared on the Office of Management and Budget blog courtesy of Jeffrey Zients.

Over 57,000 of you have spoken, and the winner of the 2010 SAVE Award is Trudy Givens of Portage, Wisconsin.

Trudy is a 19-year veteran of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, working now as a Business Administrator in the FCI Oxford facility in Oxford, Wisconsin. Over the course of her career, Trudy noticed that copies from the Federal Register — the federal government’s official daily publication for rules, proposed rules, and notices of Federal agencies and organizations, as well as executive orders and other presidential documents– were delivered to her workplace several times per week, but employees rarely referenced the documents. The Federal Register was made available online years ago, and most members of the interested public reference that online version now. Trudy thought that in keeping with the President’s spirit of cutting out waste and going green, the government should end the printing and mailing of thousands of Federal Registers to employees.

The budget team at OMB did a little digging and found that Trudy was right – most folks access the register online. But the Register is still sent to thousands of federal employees in hard copies every day. While statute requires that hard copies be available, allowing recipients to opt-in for hard copy delivery could yield savings associated with printing and postage. When a similar “opt-in” (with fee) option was offered to the public, the number of hard copies mailed was reduced from roughly 25,000 to 500 recipients. This sounded like a commonsense idea for savings to us – and it did to thousands of you as well. Trudy won the contest with nearly 20,000 votes. The runners up were: Marjorie Cook from the Department of Agriculture, Paul Behe from the Department of Homeland Security, and Thomas Koenning from the Department of Labor.

As this year’s winner, Trudy will be invited to meet the President to discuss her idea with him in person.

But if you were rooting for one of the other three finalists, not to worry. All the finalists and all SAVE Award submissions have been sent to the agencies for potential action and inclusion in the 2012 Budget. Last year, a total of 20 SAVE ideas made it into the President’s FY2011 budget – including the winner and the other three finalists – identifying millions of dollars in savings.

So our gratitude goes out to all of the federal employees who submitted ideas to boost government performance and thanks to everyone who voted for the 2010 SAVE Award. Each of us in the federal government has the ability and the responsibility to pitch in to make every tax dollar count. Not just during the SAVE Award competition, but all year round. And it is this commitment to making government work better for you, exemplified by our finalists Trudy, Marjorie, Paul and Thomas, that we honor today.

This year, for the first time, all agencies subject to FOIA were required to submit Chief FOIA Officer reports. In those reports, agencies were asked to describe the steps they had taken to improve transparency in accordance with the President’s FOIA Memorandum, and the Attorney General’s FOIA Guidelines. The department’s Office of Information Policy (OIP) has analyzed and prepared a summary of the reports. The reports show that more documents have been released, more information has been made available on websites, and backlogs of pending requests have decreased in the past year.

“These 94 agencies have taken significant steps forward in providing the American people with the transparency they want and deserve,” said Attorney General Eric Holder. “Much work needs to be done in the effort to open up the government’s FOIA process and improve its efficiency, but these results indicate we have made important strides in the right direction.”

Among the results:

• All agencies reported progress in implementing the presumption of openness, with over half having that progress rated as “remarkable.”
• Almost half of the ninety four agencies reported divulging documents in discretionary releases – i.e., the documents were requested under the FOIA and the agency could legally have withheld information, but chose not to. Over half looked for opportunities to do so.
• More information is being released to FOIA requesters. In Fiscal Year 2009, the number of responses with released records, either records released in full or in part, increased overall. The number of partial releases increased by approximately 50,000 documents.
• 89% of agencies reported proactively disclosing material on their websites – i.e., producing material that has not (yet) been requested by the public.
• 95% of agencies, including all Cabinet agencies, can receive FOIA requests electronically, rather than merely via snail mail or other non-technological methods. 91% track the requests electronically as well.
• 60% of agencies either had no backlog in processing FOIA requests or reduced that backlog in Fiscal Year 2009. 85% reduced the age of the oldest request or had no backlogged request to close.