Who Stole the Election?
Dominating many state legislatures, Republicans have launched a full-on assault on voting rights.Patrick Caldwell | October 11, 2011
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The push against voting rights in Maine is just one example of the most direct assault on ballot access since the Jim Crow era. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the influential corporate-funded group that writes model bills for Republican state legislators, has pushed Republicans across the country to impose new restrictions on voting and to overturn progressive laws like Maine's. "I don't want everybody to vote," ALEC co-founder Paul Weyrich said three decades ago. "As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."
Since the Voting Rights Act of 1965, states have passed a steady stream of reforms to make it easier for people to vote.
Now Republicans are pushing to make voting more difficult. "This is a hard-fought privilege," one Florida state senator said earlier this year. "This is something people die for. You want to make it convenient?"The most headline-grabbing effort has been the creation of laws requiring voters to have photo identification at the polls. Five states -- Texas, South Carolina, Wisconsin, Tennessee, and Kansas -- have enacted strict photo-ID laws since the beginning of the year. Democrats argue that these laws have clear political motivations. Studies indicate that the groups most likely to vote Democratic -- the young, elderly, poor, mobile, and minorities -- are the ones whose members tend to lack a photo ID. The rules are often configured specifically to favor the Republican base at the expense of excluding likely Democrats. In Texas, for example, showing a military ID or a concealed-gun license will get you a ballot, but a college ID won't. As many as one in four African Americans lack the identification these states now require, leading Georgia Congressman John Lewis to call the laws "poll taxes by another name." (Under the Voting Rights Act, voter-ID laws in Texas and South Carolina must be approved by the Department of Justice because of those states' history of minority-voter suppression. At press time, the department had not yet ruled.)
But
as stifling as voter-ID laws might be, a plethora of manipulations to voter-access laws pose an even larger threat. Numerous states recently have cut back on early voting, which had made it much easier for the working poor -- people who often can't get off work on Election Day -- to cast a ballot. In 2008, around 40 million Americans took advantage of early voting. That number will almost surely be lower in 2012, thanks to Republican efforts in states like Ohio. Thirty percent of Ohio's ballots in the last presidential election were cast by early or absentee voters. In March, though, the Republican -- controlled legislature reduced the state's 35-day window of early voting to 24 days of mail-in voting and just 11 days of in-person early voting. Florida also shortened its early-voting window and made things even trickier for voting-rights advocates by rewriting state laws to impose steep fines on voter-registration organizations if registration forms contain even minor mistakes. The League of Women Voters, the group at the forefront of registering voters across the country, shuttered its Florida voter-registration operation as a result.more...
http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=who_stole_the_election
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