Perhaps the most nefarious legislation to pop up in states over the past year have been new laws intended to make it more difficult for people to vote. In an unprecedented move, Republican-controlled legislatures have passed a wide range of new bills in 2011 that will restrict, rather than broaden, access to the ballot box. As a result, the Brennan Center for Justice estimates that as many as 5 million voters could be disenfranchised in the 2012 election. These new laws could be enough, Rolling Stone writes, “to shift the outcome in favor of the GOP.” Indeed, with poorer voters and minorities hit hardest by the new restrictions, Republicans could see an electoral windfall in 2012 simply by changing election rules. Thirty-one years after Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and father of the modern conservative movement, told a Dallas crowd that “I don’t want everybody to vote,” Republicans are making good on his call to making voting more difficult in the United States. Let’s take a closer look at the different ways in which states are make voting significantly more difficult.
WAR ON VOTING: Perhaps the most sweeping change in voting rights since the 2010 election is the proliferation of state laws requiring citizens to present photo identification in order to vote. First introduced in Indiana in 2008, new “photo ID” laws have the potential to disenfranchise 3.2 million voters, mostly poorer residents and minorities. This was plainly evident when a group of retired nuns in the Hoosier State were turned away from voting in the 2008 primary election because they lacked proper photo identification. Three years later, half a dozen new states have followed Indiana’s lead: Georgia, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin. Rather than each state independently concluding that they needed a photo ID law, model legislation was pushed to state lawmakers by the right-wing corporate front group American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). In South Carolina alone, a new study warns that “nearly 180,000 voters – most of whom are elderly, student, minority or low-income voters – will be disenfranchised as a result of this discriminatory bill.” Meanwhile, a 96-year-old Tennessee woman named Dorothy Cooper attempted to comply with her state’s new photo ID law this month, only to be denied a voter ID because she didn’t have her marriage certificate. Cooper later told MSNBC that her experience now is worse than in the Jim Crow era. Unperturbed, some politicians like Herman Cain and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have thrown their support behind a national photo ID law. The war on voting isn’t just restricted to new photo ID laws; five states – Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee, and West Virginia – have reduced their early voting periods as well.
