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Report: Voting Laws May Disenfranchise 10 Million Hispanic U.S. Citizens: Study


Sep 24, 2012 by

The prospect that a very large number of American citizens who just happened to vote for Democratic candidates in 2008 will be prevented from voting on election day 2012 looms large. How large? A new report says that voting laws designed to prevent widespread voting fraud that by all accounts has not happened in past elections could disenfranchise 10 million Hispanic American citizens from voting — and tilt the election to Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

New voting laws in 23 of the 50 states could keep more than 10 million Hispanic U.S. citizens from registering and voting, a new study said on Sunday, a number so large it could affect the outcome of the November 6 election.

The Latino community accounts for more than 10 percent of eligible voters nationally. But the share in some states is high enough that keeping Hispanic voters away from the polls could shift some hard-fought states from support for Democratic President Barack Obama and help his Republican rival, Mitt Romney.

The new laws include purges of people suspected of not being citizens in 16 states that unfairly target Latinos, the civil rights group Advancement Project said in the study to be formally released on Monday.

Laws in effect in one state and pending in two others require proof of citizenship for voter registration. That imposes onerous and sometimes expensive documentation requirements on voters, especially targeting naturalized American citizens, many of whom are Latino, the liberal group said.

Nine states have passed restrictive photo identification laws that impose costs in time and money for millions of Latinos who are citizens but do not yet have the required identification, it said.

Republican-led state legislatures have passed most of the new laws since the party won sweeping victories in state and local elections in 2010. They say the laws are meant to prevent voter fraud; critics say they are designed to reduce turnout among groups that typically back Democrats.

Decades of study have found virtually no use of false identification in U.S. elections or voting by non-citizens. Activists say the bigger problem in the United States, where most elections see turnout of well under 60 percent, is that eligible Americans do not bother to vote.

Nationwide, polls show Obama leading Romney among Hispanic voters by 70 percent to 30 percent or more, and winning that voting bloc by a large margin is seen as an important key to Obama winning re-election.

Meeanwhile, the issue of African-Americans being kept from going to the polls in what critics of these laws claim is a 21st century version of the infamous poll tax laws is also a big one — such a big one that First Lady Michele Obama has gotten involved:

The first lady tells a gathering of black lawmakers and leaders that they owe it to those who fought and died for equal rights in the 1960s to make sure every voter can freely cast a ballot.

Her comments at an annual awards banquet for the Congressional Black Caucus come amidst a push in more than a dozen states to pass laws requiring voters to show ID at the polls. Critics say the laws unfairly harm minorities, poor people and college students – all groups that tend to vote Democratic.

Comparing it to the civil rights movement, Obama calls voting rights “the march or our time” and “the sit in of our day.”

Also, read Robert Stein’s post HERE.

Critics note that some of the voter ID laws in some states seem also specifically designed to keep seniors from voting or to make it extremely hard for many to do so.

So Hispanics…African-Americans…seniors…

All that’s missing is an effort to keep college students from voting.

But wait:

In Tennessee, a new law requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls explicitly excludes student IDs.

In Wisconsin, college students are newly disallowed from using university-provided housing lists or corroboration from other students to verify their residence.

Florida’s reduction in early voting days is expected to reduce the number of young and first-time voters there.

And Pennsylvania’s voter identification bill, still on the books for now, disallows many student IDs and non-Pennsylvania driver’s licenses, which means out-of-state students may be turned away at the polls.

In 2008, youth voter turnout was higher that it had been since Vietnam, and overwhelmingly for Barack Obama. This time around, the GOP isn’t counting solely on disillusionment to keep the student vote down.

In the last two years, Republican-controlled state legislatures have passed dozens of bills that erect new barriers to voting, all targeting Democratic-leaning groups, many specifically aimed at students. The GOP’s stated rationale is to fight voter fraud. But voter fraud — and especially in-person fraud which many of these measures address — is essentially nonexistent.

There is always plausible deniability, except no one believes the denials on talk radio, cable talk or on new media websites. But the intent is clear:

None of the new laws blocks student voting outright — although in New Hampshire, Republican lawmakers almost passed a bill that would have banned out-of-state students from casting a ballot. (The leader of the State House, Bill O’Brien, was caught on tape explaining how the move was necessary to stop students from “basically doing what I did when I was a kid: voting as a liberal.”)

And in some states, education officials are trying to limit the damage. In Pennsylvania, for instance, many universities are either reissuing IDs or printing expiration stickers to make current cards valid, according to a survey by the Pennsylvania Public Interest Research Group.

But every additional barrier makes a difference to students, said Maxwell Love, a 21-year-old senior at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “It’s the little things that make voting harder that are going to affect apathetic students … This is like literally slamming the door on youth engagement.”

Voting advocates agree. “This is absolutely perfectly rigged to prevent students from voting,” said David Halperin, an attorney and former director of national youth organization Campus Progress.

The Republican motivation is obvious, Halperin said. “In general, they would prefer that students don’t vote … They certainly don’t want students to vote in swing states who don’t live in swing states.”

Potentially even more damaging to student voter turnout is the confusion caused by new and changing rules, some of which are being challenged in court. “The confusion surrounding it … is the most infuriating thing,” said Love. “The confusion is, like, literally pissing people off to the point where they’re not going to take the time to figure it out.”

The problem:

If an election is a close one and won by keeping away from the polls specific groups of voters who voted for one party last time by the party that didn’t get those groups votes last time based on the premise that there was a widespread problem that actually cannot be found to exist, then you have a real legitimacy problem.

And if you thought 2000 was a controversial outcome, if this happens you ain’t seen nothing yet…..

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56 Comments

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  1. DORIAN DE WIND, Military Affairs Columnist
    September 25, 2012 | 4:43 pm

    Well, the answer is easy, obvious and “right there”: “the fact that there is no evidence means little.”

    Nope not the same situation because there is the ability to track and review voting by race so it does in deed mean something.

    Yup, so there is evidence?

  2. sheknows
    September 25, 2012 | 6:59 pm

    Photo IDs are hard to come by unless you drive a vehicle, one of the only accepted photo ID’s accepted at the polls. This is criminal, but worse it is totally unamerican. Their attempt to limit the minority vote is just another example of the kind of government the Republicans would have in this country. Rule by the wealthy, powerful and elite. Suppression of the weak, poor and less fortunate masses. Hmmm, don’t we still uphold our founding ideals and in fact send our troops to other countries to defend them? Many of the seniors affected by this Republican censorship are the very ones who risked their lives to defend the very ideals they are no longer afforded in their own country.

  3. roro80
    September 25, 2012 | 7:29 pm

    BTW, if anyone doubts the ability of voter suppression to succeed as a strategy, I strongly recommend those who did not read the very detailed, very well annotated Rolling Stone article from 2006 about the 2004 election in Ohio.

    http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0601-34.htm

  4. EEllis
    September 25, 2012 | 8:03 pm

    Photo IDs are hard to come by unless you drive a vehicle, one of the only accepted photo ID’s accepted at the polls.

    I don’t know what State you believe you are referring to but that is just not true. They accept many types of ID’s including school ID’s. Almost all states will let you cast provisional ballots and allow you a chance to work it out latter. You are just massively incorrect.

  5. SteveK
    September 25, 2012 | 8:32 pm

    Good link roro80… Rolling Stone has lead the field by keeping up on these immoral laws being enacted by Republicans.

    Here’s a link to their May 30, 2012 article Florida GOP Takes Voter Suppression to a Brazen New Extreme which says in part:

    Imagine this: a Republican governor in a crucial battleground state instructs his secretary of state to purge the voting rolls of hundreds of thousands of allegedly ineligible voters. The move disenfranchises thousands of legally registered voters, who happen to be overwhelmingly black and Hispanic Democrats. The number of voters prevented from casting a ballot exceeds the margin of victory in the razor-thin election, which ends up determining the next President of the United States.
    .
    If this scenario sounds familiar, that’s because it happened in Florida in 2000. And twelve years later, just months before another presidential election, history is repeating itself.
    .
    Back in 2000, 12,000 eligible voters – a number twenty-two times larger than George W. Bush’s 537 vote triumph over Al Gore – were wrongly identified as convicted felons and purged from the voting rolls in Florida… African Americans, who favored Gore over Bush by 86 points, accounted for 11 percent of the state’s electorate but 41 percent of those purged…
    .
    The latest purge comes on the heels of a trio of new voting restrictions passed by Florida Republicans last year, disenfranchising 100,000 previously eligible ex-felons who’d been granted the right to vote under GOP Governor Charlie Crist in 2008; shutting down non-partisan voter registration drives; and cutting back on early voting. The measures, the effect of which will be to depress Democratic turnout in November, are similar to voting curbs passed by Republicans in more than a dozen states, on the bogus pretext of combating “voter fraud” but with the very deliberate goal of shaping the electorate to the GOP’s advantage before a single vote has been cast.
    .
    … Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, instructed Secretary of State Ken Browning to compile a massive database of alleged “non-citizen” voters. Browning resigned in February rather than implement Scott’s plan…
    .
    … his successor, Kurt Detzner, a former beer-industry lobbyist, announced a list of 182,000 suspected non-citizens to be removed from the voting rolls, along with 50,000 apparently dead voters…
    .
    … “an excess of 20 percent of the voters flagged as ‘non-citizens’ in Miami-Dade area, in fact, citizens. And the actual number may be much higher.” If this ratio holds for the rest of the names on the non-citizens list, more than 35,000 eligible voters could be disenfranchised…
    .
    [...]
    .
    … As in 2000, the purge disproportionately targets Democratic voters. Two-thirds of the alleged non-citizens on the initial purge list reside in heavily Democratic Miami-Dade County… Florida Hispanics, who voted 57 percent for Obama in 2008, are only 13 percent of the state’s electorate but make up 58 percent of the non-citizens list. Whites, by contrast, account for 68 percent of registered Florida voters but only 13 percent of alleged non-citizens. Democrats outnumber Republicans on the list by two to one…
    .
    [...]

    There’s more for those interested in the ‘facts of the matter’ and Rolling Stone is one of the best sources of DOCUMENTED information on this subject here’s links to a few more of their articles:

    August 30, 2011 – The GOP War on Voting

    October 3, 2011 – GOP War on Voting: New Laws Could Block Five Million From Polls

    The Republicans have commented up-thread that ‘it’s all the same’… ‘Voter fraud and voter suppression are both equally bad’… ‘We shouldn’t jump to a snap judgment’… ‘We need more hard data’…

    It’s enough to make a body wonder what happened to the Republican Party and those who are still blindly loyal to them.
    .

  6. SteveK
    September 25, 2012 | 8:42 pm

    Here’s where Voter ID requirements currently stand:

    State-by-state requirements as of August 2012
    .
    The statutes, as of August 2012, of the 50 U.S. states regarding the required or requested showing of ID at the polling place are as follows:
    .
    Strict photo ID (voters must show photo ID at polling place or follow-up with election officials soon after the election if they fail to provide a photo ID when voting): Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Pennsylvania and Tennessee. In addition, Mississippi and South Carolina have strict photo ID laws that must receive, but have not received, approval from the U.S. Justice Department; pending such approval, they all require non-photo ID, except for Mississippi which has no other voter ID law on the books.
    .
    Photo ID or alternative (voters at polling place must either show photo ID or meet another state-specific requirements, such as answering personal questions correctly or being vouched for by another voter or poll worker(s) who has a voter ID): Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Louisiana, Michigan and South Dakota. New Hampshire also has one of these laws, but it requires pre-approval from the U.S. Justice Department first.
    .
    Non-photo ID (state-specific list of acceptable forms of polling place ID, including a non-photo form): Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington. Arizona, Ohio and Virginia also have strict, after election follow-up rules for voters that fail to provide the required voter ID when voting at a polling place. Alabama has a newer photo ID law that is scheduled to take effect in 2014, if it gets pre-approval from the U.S. Justice Department.
    .
    No ID required at polling place: all other states not noted above.

    But this information is not the whole of of the problem… I’m reasonably sure that any one of us here would raise enough fuss that our votes would be counted but there are untold hundreds of thousands (if not millions) that would be intimidated enough to just stay home… And that’s the crime… And that fact too I’m reasonably sure we are ALL aware of.

    To some it just doesn’t seem to be important.
    .

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