Our nation’s democracy is in a crisis. We are facing the biggest challenge to our nation since its inception. No, there is not an armed rebellion going on, but, oh, is there a war -- a silent, insidious, invidious, nefarious, absolutely downright ugly war. And the war is on the right to vote for American citizens.
At the Children's Defense Fund’s recent national conference Barbara Arnwine, the Executive Director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and a leader of Election Protection, the nation's largest nonpartisan voter protection coalition, issued an urgent call to action. Right now assaults on voting rights across the country in advance of the 2012 elections are keeping her very busy.
Arwine said 25 million Americans who had voted in 2008 did not vote in the 2010 midterm elections, and when new state legislators came into power after those elections, their first priority was figuring out how to keep those 25 million people from returning to the polls. Legislators in 35 states quickly drafted bills making it harder for people to vote: “everything from photo ID laws, to laws restricting early voting, to laws making it harder for third-party registration groups to register people to vote, to laws making it harder for people to vote on Sundays because in many states that’s when Latinos and African-Americans voted the heaviest, to laws restricting student voting.” Arnwine said the lawmakers behind these bills were counting on the targeted voters not noticing what was happening until it was too late.
But, she said, “they forgot that we stand on the shoulders of giants who we will never let down ... we get up in the morning and we say that we cannot negate the legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer; that we will never forget the legacy of Cesar Chavez; that we never will negate the legacy of Mr. Korematsu; that we never can sit back and let rights be stolen.” Arnwine then shared her Map of Shame: Voter Suppression Legislation by State, that shows all of us who are ready to fight back exactly where the battlegrounds are.
The map’s original title was the Map of Voter Suppression in the United States, but one day as Arnwine was studying an early version she heard her late father’s voice in her head saying what he always did when he saw something wrong: “That’s a sin and a shame.” It’s a sin and a shame that in 2012 we are still fighting the same battles for voting rights that have been going on since the nation was founded and facing some of the same Jim Crow-era voter suppression tactics we hoped were dead and buried after the Civil Rights Movement. But as Frederick Douglass taught us, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” So the first step for every one of us is to become familiar with the Map of Shame, especially the current and proposed voting laws in our own states.
Then we each need a plan. Arnwine and her colleagues are doing their part by suing states whose proposed laws violate the Voting Rights Act. But Arnwine stressed that every person can do something to fight in this war on the right to vote, and we each need to decide now how we will execute our roles. Begin by using traditional networks and social networks to make sure every single person you know is a “V.I.P.”: they have verified their voter registration status; they have the right identification for their state; and they know their precinct.
The last is important, Arnwine said, “because the biggest devilment that goes on in these elections are what we call deceptive practices -- people are going to get robocalls, and they’re going to get fliers that claim they’re from the NAACP and everything, telling people to go to the wrong polling place . . . if they're in the wrong polling places, in most states their vote will not count.” Securing “V.I.P.” status is critical to making sure people will not be disenfranchised on Election Day.
Next, Arnwine said, we need to counter the organized groups who are already planning to send “poll watchers” to African-American, Latino, and student voting places to intimidate and harass voters, and we need to “get [our] friends to become poll workers, official poll workers, because that’s what they’re doing -- they’re putting them inside of the polling places also, so they can challenge people on the inside and nobody will know what they’re doing. So we need good people sitting next to them, making sure that people have access to the ballot.” Now is the time to sign up for these roles.
We can also volunteer at Election Protection Coalition Command Centers to help watch out for local problems. Finally, on Election Day every one of us must do the basic job of helping other people get to the polls -- as Arnwine says even “if you’re bedridden get up in the morning and call everybody you know: ‘Are you going to vote today?’”
Arnwine summed up this way: “There is a role for everybody. Don’t forget. If you forget everything that I said today, if you remember nothing, just remember this one thing: that we can only win this fight if you fight.” We cannot stand by and let the right to vote be taken away again on our watch. Every one of us must decide what we can do in the fight to protect voting rights today. There’s no time to waste.
Follow Marian Wright Edelman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ChildDefender
http://beta.wosu.org/allsides/should-voters-have-more-or-fewer-opportunities-to-vote-in-2012/
beta.wosu.org
Obligatory histrionic liberal response: "They are the same! The GOP has its boot on the neck of democracy because they want to stop fraud with an absolutely free ID card." Et cetera ad infinitum. Yawn.
Minnesota is a shining example of how to do it right. And yet we are facing a vote this November on voter ID put forth by Republicans. They want to take it from a first class act to one so bad it would not allow absentee ballots!
This is NOT about fraud, this about voter suppression.
My state, among others, allows resident aliens to obtain drivers licenses and state IDs.
In any case, the provided ID would be checked against voter rolls at the polling booth to ensure that only legal citizens are able to vote.
received ID cards to use, but they are now invalid. The program the state has been using
to create photo cards cannot create cards for names with hyphens & names that begin with
names like McC. The state has promised to correct this by the end of August, but voter
registration must be completed by 9/16. Voter IDs are supposed to be free, but many
have been charged $13.50 per ID. It all seems very rushed to correct the problem of
voter fraud that state officials said was the reason for the law, but in hearings held last
month, they admitted Pa. had no cases of voter fraud in the last 10 years.
Checking voter fraud is quite hard isn't it? Let's say someone shows up and impersonates someone else and votes. Who is capturing the evidence that he did so? Wouldn't that need taking pictures of everyone who votes, etc?
Polls show Americans overwhelmingly support Voter ID laws by 74%. Citizens have voted and passed Voter ID legislation and the Supreme Court supported it in 2008 with a 6 to 3 vote in support (Justice Stevens wrote the majority opinion hardly a conservative)
We live in a pluralist society of laws. The people have spoken.
Sincerely,
Paul Hargraves
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/poll-concerns-about-voter-fraud-spur-broad-support-for-voter-id-laws/2012/08/11/40db3aba-e2fb-11e1-ae7f-d2a13e249eb2_story.html
For the record.
* Republicans Freed the Slaves!* Jim Crow Laws were enforced by Democrats* the KKK was the terror arm of the Democrat Party*the VRA was had greater support from Republicans than Democrates
I'm Proud to be Republican!
Sincerely,Paul Hargraves
how can you even post such blatant lies??? Obama is leading Romney among African American by about 18-1, among Latinos more than 3-1 and a 50%-37% lead among 18-29 year olds.
You sir, are lying and should stop.....
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/aug-18-obama-leads-big-among-those-least-likely-to-vote/
News Flash!
* Republicans Freed the slaves!
* Jim Crow was enforced by Democrats
* the KKK was the terror arm of the Democrat Party
* The Civil Rights Bill of 1964 had much stronger support from Republicans than Democrats
Sincerely,
Paul Hargraves
News Flash!
*The North freed the slaves
*Jim Crow was enforced by The South
*The KKK was the terror arm of The South
*The Civil Rights Bill of 1964 was signed into law by a Democratic president and directly caused The South to shift to the Republican party.
Sincerely,
The Truth
Some of the elderly now don't have a birth certificate to get an ID because you were born in a state where they were not required at your birth (in Alaska, you didn't have to report births until 1960).
There have also been similar allegations about Mitt Romney, claiming to live with his son so he could vote in the MA elections. The allegation indicates he was not residing in MA at the time.
If you can't see what's really going on here, that's your deficiency. You can be as blind as you want, but that does NOT change the fact of what's going on here.....
You people have all these hypotheticals you love to trot out while completely ignoring REALITY. You can tell all the scary MADE UP stories you want....that does NOT change REALITY.....