On largely a party-line vote, legislators agreed Thursday to allow Secretary of State Ross Miller to spend $800,000 for a voter registration effort.

Two of the nine Republicans and all 12 Democrats on the Interim Finance Committee backed the plan, which Democrat Miller said was prompted in part by a lawsuit from the NAACP, La Raza and other groups against his office, which oversees voting in Nevada.

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Some Republicans questioned whether the voter drive was necessary. They said that political parties themselves are registering voters and that the funds should be used to buy or maintain voting machines.

None of them mentioned the obvious: that studies by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found 95 percent of blacks and 66 percent of Hispanics voted for Democrat Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election, and a voter registration drive might lead to more voting by minorities in November, with Obama on the ballot again.

Read more at the Las Vegas Review-Journal.