Reports out of Texas over the past month show a pattern familiar to voting rights groups: top law enforcement officials engaged in deeply politicized efforts to push prosecutions and policies that disenfranchise low-income and minority voters. Steve Rosenfeld, writing in the Texas Observer, lays out the the whole story in detail, but the general gist feels a lot like the politicization scandal the US Department of Justice brought to light over the course of 2007.
(I've written about the need to unstack the deck, but don't forget that Republicans are working even harder to stack it even further. See the list below of vote suppression legislation - every single bill sponsored by a Republican. - promoted by Daniel De Groot)
Cross-posted at Project Vote's blog, Voting Matters
Weekly Voting Rights News Update
By Erin Ferns
Requiring proof-of-citizenship in order to register to vote is the latest addition to voter suppression arsenal. Spurred by Arizona's 2004 implementation of proof of citizenship requirements and the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision to uphold Indiana's strict voter ID law, proof of citizenship bills - often coupled with voter ID - are gaining traction across the country. With more than 13 million Americans lacking ready access to citizenship documentation and scant evidence of voter registration fraud by non-citizens (or any voter for that matter) leading to illegal votes, proof of citizenship requirements could have a significant impact on the electorate. Wasting no time after the high court's decision, the neighboring states of Kansas and Missouri have swiftly moved forward with efforts to pass such legislation that could take effect in the November election.
Project Vote normally uses this update to give news roundups on voting rights-related stories from the past week. However, with the reverberations from the Supreme Court's Crawford vs. Marion County voter identification decision just starting to filter down into statehouses across the country, we felt it was necessary to spend this update concentrating solely on voter ID, giving progressives a concise summary of the problems associated with it and offer some framing devices to help fight against it.
Cross-posted at Project Vote's blog, Voting Matters
Weekly Voting Rights News Update
By Erin Ferns
Supreme Court Legalizes Voter Disenfranchisement
In the midst of a presidential election year that is seeing record-breaking voter turnout in state after state, the Supreme Court on April 28 ruled in favor of Indiana's draconian voter ID requirement. The controversial law - which requires all voters to provide government issued, photographic proof of identity in order to vote at the polls - threatens to create a legislative domino effect of new voter ID laws ready for implementation before November.
America's Democratic Promise The history of democracy in the United States is one marked by the steady, though intensely contested, expansion of the right to vote. Where once only male landowners were permitted the right to choose their representatives, the United States now proudly extends that right to all adult citizens. The most recent expansion of the franchise were the result of years of struggle through the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement. The seminal Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the 26th Amendment ratified in 1971 created enforcement mechanisms to protect minority voting rights and extended the right to vote to 18 year olds.
Ohio's electorate is not reflective of the state's voting eligible population, according to a new report by Project Vote. "Ohio Votes: Civic Engagement in the Buckeye State," written by Benjamin Spears, examines disparities in registration and voting rates by race/ethnicity, income and age.
Project Vote released a report this week that shows persistent bias in the Kentucky electorate: those who were registered to vote and vote in the Bluegrass State were not representative of the state's overall eligible population in 2006. This report takes a state-level look at the same topic as a recently released Project Vote report by Doug Hess, Representational Bias in the 2006 Electorate.
The US Census Bureau released data this week on the millions of Americans who moved between 2005 and 2006. The Census tables highlight demographic characteristics, including sex, race and ethnicity, income, educational attainment and other qualities.
Considering that persons must re-register at every new address to be eligible to cast a ballot, the effect that mobility can have on the enfranchisement of millions of Americans is enormous.
Highlights of the Census Geographic Mobility 2005-2006 data include:
Young or college-age voters have been found to share similar characteristics with poor and minority voters: They vote Democratic and are underrepresented in the electorate. Their turnout rates are also "depressed by some simple but strong barriers." Such barriers - which are identical to those historically affecting poor and minority voters - include identification requirements; long lines at the polls; vote "challenges; and intimidation.
While the question of whether or not voter ID laws disenfranchise minority, elderly and poor voters is being reviewed by the Supreme Court, John Tanner, chief of the Justice Department's Voting Section, says they do not. In fact, in a jaw-dropping twist of analysis, he told the National Latino Congreso that voter ID laws have "the opposite impact"
Project Vote released a report today, "Representational Bias in the 2006 Electorate," by Douglass Hess that finds a continuing problem with the U.S. electorate: those who are registered and vote are not representative of the overall U.S. population eligible to vote. The proportion of the U.S. population that registers to vote and that does vote is highly skewed towards Whites, the educated and the wealthy. Furthermore, young eligible Americans, particularly young minority males, and those who have recently moved, are disproportionately represented among those who do not participate in the U.S. electorate.
There is a strong correlation between the Voting Rights Act and the election of minorities to national, state and local levels office, according to this study in the July issue of the PS: Political Science and Politics. In fact, the numbers indicate that without the provisions in the Voting Rights Act, there would be almost no minority elected officials anywhere in the United States.
I am a colored American from a minority and marginalized religious community. I am mostly non-partisan, though I have libertarian and left leanings. I have been involved in Kos (with variable resulsts), frontpage at Agonist (Sean Kelley rules) and write at Huffington Post.
What are your positions on minorities? Are identity politics going to be part of the game with due recognition that minority groups need that at least within the initial stages of their development? Will identity politics be encouraged to subsume themselves into to the greater left i.e. by way of equal concern with economic issues - thus creating a brotherhood of economically marginalized, which would include whites?
