ASIDE from the stupid and egregious Citizens United court decision that allows corporations to make unlimited political donations to a campaign the newly enacted voting laws are an affront to democracy.
More than five million voters this year could be turned away at the polls under the new laws, according to statistics released Oct. 3 by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, a non-partisan public policy institute. “It’s probably the most dramatic assault on voting rights we’ve seen in a number of years,” said Jonathan Brater, a counsel at the Brennan Center. “It’s going to have a major effect.” That change forced Rock the Vote and the League of Women Voters — third-party registration groups — to suspend their registration activities in the state because of harsh penalties they could face for not complying with the stricter deadlines. The two groups, in conjunction with the Florida Public Interest Research group, filed a lawsuit Dec. 15 against the new law, labeling the law as onerous for voter registration drives.
These voting law changes are radical and completely unnecessary. They especially hurt those who have been historically locked out of our electoral system, like minorities, poor people, and students. Often they seem precisely targeted to exclude certain voters,” said Wendy. R. Weiser, report co-author and Director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center. “After the Florida election fiasco in 2000, it became clear that the rules of election administration could affect outcomes. This time, those rules are being altered in a way that will likely hurt millions.”
EXAMPLES of How Legitimate Voters were denied their right to Vote!
Ricky Tyrone
Ricky is a 58 year-old Marine Corps veteran. Despite the fact that he was able to offer Wisconsin voting officials proof of his honorable discharge from the Marines, Milwaukee County has been unable to find the record of his birth that he needs in order to obtain a voter ID card.
Ruthelle Frank
Ruthelle is an 84 year-old former elected official who voted in every election for the last 63 years, yet she will be unable to obtain a voter ID unless she pays a fee to obtain a birth certificate from the Wisconsin government—despite the fact that the Constitution explicitly forbids any voter from being charged a fee in order to vote. Worse, because the attending physician at her birth misspelled her name on her original birth certificate, she may need to pay hundreds of dollars in court fees to petition the state judiciary to correct her certificate before she can obtain a voter ID.
Paul Carroll
Paul is an 86-year-old World War II veteran who has lived in the same Ohio town for four decades. Yet when he attempted to vote in the recent Ohio primary, he was told his photo ID from the Department of Veterans Affairs was not good enough because it did not include his address.
Dorothy Cooper
Dorothy is a 96-year-old African-American woman who says she has voted in every election but one since she became eligible to vote. Yet when she attempted to obtain a voter ID she was turned away because she did not have a copy of her marriage license. In a subsequent interview Dorothy said that she didn’t even have problems voting in Tennessee “during Jim Crow days —only now under Voter ID.
Thelma Mitchell
Thelma is a 93-year-old woman who cleaned the Tennessee Capitol for 30 years. She never received a birth certificate, however, because she was delivered by a midwife in Alabama in 1918 and there was no record of her birth. When she attempted to obtain a voter ID, she was turned away for lack of a birth certificate by a clerk who suggested she could be an illegal immigrant.
Virginia Lasater
Virginia is a 91-year-old woman who has been active in political campaigns for 70 years Because of her advanced age, however, she is no longer able to stand for extended periods of time. When she attempted to obtain a voter ID, she was confronted with lines that stretched for several hours and no place to sit while she waited—forcing her to abandon her effort to obtain an ID due to her physical constraints.
Darwin Spinks
Darwin is an 86 year-old World War II veteran. He was told to pay a fee before he could obtain a voter ID in Tennessee, despite the fact that charging someone to vote is unconstitutional.
Rita Platt
Rita is a Wisconsin resident who was turned away from her attempt to obtain a voter ID because she required either a birth certificate or a passport to obtain one—both of which can only be obtained if the voter pays a fee. Worse, in Wisconsin, voters must fill out a misleading form that suggests that they cannot obtain the birth certificate they need to obtain a photo ID unless they already have a photo ID.
Jessica Cohen
Jessica is a Texas resident who lost her license and other identification papers in a burglary. She now must also pay an unconstitutional fee in order to obtain the birth certificate she needs to obtain a new voter ID. Because Cohen lives in Texas, she will likely be able to vote in 2012 because the Department of Justice blocked Texas’s law under the Voting Rights Act—although there is a high risk that the Supreme Court’s conservatives will declare the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional.
These nine voters are representative of the millions of voters who could be deprived of their right to vote after exercising that right for, in some cases, decades. Their problems will become more commonplace as additional states continue to pass suppressive laws.
CONCLUSIONS
When speaking about this subject at the Campus Progress National Conference in 2011, President Bill Clinton asked the young audience why these laws making it harder to vote were all being proposed in such a high rate and passed across the country. The answer, he said, was that “They are trying to make the 2012 electorate look more like the 2010 electorate than the 2008 electorate.”
Conservatives are scared because each cycle more young and minority voters are entering voting age and their collective impact is growing accordingly. In 2008 about 48 million Millennial generation voters—those born between 1978 and 2000—were old enough to vote. By 2012, that number will be 64 million, or 29 percent of all eligible voters. According to analysis by the Center for American Progress, by 2020, when all Millennial voters are of voting age, about 90 million of them will be eligible to vote and will comprise around 40 percent of all eligible American voters. This parallels changes in minority voters—from 1988 to 2008 the percent of minority voters increased to 26 percent from 15 percent.
These young and minority voters are strongly progressive. They strongly support progressive staples such as investing in renewable energy and maintaining Social Security. This has translated into elections as well. In 2008 both young voters and Hispanic voters delivered two-thirds of their votes to President Obama.
Taken together, the growing influence of staunchly progressive voters has conservatives scared to the point of extreme measures. Backed by large corporate donors, they are looking for any proposal or law that will help negate this change in voting demographics. While this is their motivation, the right to vote is an American right that should be protected by those of all political persuasions.
Right now, the protection of anti-voter suppression measures put in place during the 1960s is preventing the enactment of the law in key states. And in other states the laws will become ballot measures where their outcome can be decided by the voters. In many states these laws have already been passed and must be aggressively challenged through legal and electoral measures to put our system of democratic elections back on the right track.
Stupid, Egregious Voting Laws are a Threat to Our Democracy by Kelly Bowlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International
