It does seem a bit ridiculous, doesn’t it? That we still have to fight for voting rights, fight against laws that seek to suppress the vote, laws that will have a disproportionate impact on those Americans who—had they been of voting age before 1965—would likely have been barred because of their race? Ridiculous is one word for it. Infuriating is another. These tactics violate everything for which our country is supposed to stand. As President Obama put it, “The idea that you’d purposely try to prevent people from voting? un-American.”
Republican-dominated states from Arkansas to North Carolina, from Texas to Ohio to Wisconsin have implemented various restrictions on voting that have been wending their way through the courts this fall. Just last week, the U.S.Supreme Court allowed North Carolina’s law to stand—one that might well be the nation’s most awful, although the court did, thankfully, put a temporary hold on Wisconsin’s law—for this election cycle only—while it considers whether to take the case.
North Carolina’s law severely limits the forms of identification that are acceptable for one to present in order to register to vote. How severely? An analysis of data from the state Board of Elections by Democracy North Carolina revealed that blacks, women, and Democrats are disproportionately likely to lack one of the acceptable forms of ID, while whites, men, and Republicans are disproportionately likely to possess one of them. Need I remind you that this new law was enacted by Republican Gov. Pat McCrory and a Republican-controlled legislature? The folks who sued to block the law noted “that it surgically eliminated the precise forms of registration and voting that had enabled significant expansion of African-Americans’ civic participation in North Carolina over the previous decade.”
How about Ohio? In 2010 Republican John Kasich became governor, Jon Husted became secretary of state, and their party took over the legislature. They immediately set about undoing the measures implemented to ease the long lines at the polls that so embarrassed the Buckeye State in 2004, measures that ensured relatively smooth sailing on Election Day in 2008. What was their problem with what happened in Ohio in 2008? Barack Obama won, and those new laws helped him win by getting too many of the, ahem, “wrong” sort voting.
As Dale Ho—he runs the ACLU’s voting rights project—explained, early voters had, before 2008, typically been middle class and wealthy people, as well as being older than average, because those were the folks who were more likely to know about the option to vote before Election Day. And for which party do people who fall into those categories disproportionately vote? Take a wild guess. But in 2008, Ho noted, “the script got flipped.” And—all of a sudden—Republicans became desperate to limit early voting.
Voting by mail is convenient, easy, and defeats the best of the GOP’s voter suppression efforts. Sign up here to check eligibility and vote by mail, then get your friends, family, and coworkers to sign up as well.
You are welcome to follow me beyond the fold if you’d like to get more worked up.
