The presidential election of 2012 is beginning to take shape in the nation among voters, political parties, and candidates. Much of the activity is in republican state legislative bodies where an unprecedented attack is taking shape in a centrally coordinated effort to suppress parts of the electoral masses that helped to elect President Barack Obama in 2008.
Poll taxes and literacy tests were once used by Dixiecrats to keep black southerners from exercising their right to vote. Now a new breed of GOP governors and legislators are trying to turn the clock back by passing state laws that don’t look menacing at first but as a whole would keep millions of minorities, students, immigrants, the elderly, and ex-convicts from casting ballots.
According to the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization in Washington, D.C. a significant setback in voting rights has happened in the last year that mirrors voting suppression efforts from a century ago.
Republicans in general have a long history of trying to keep Democratic voters away from polling stations. Consider for a moment a statement from an influential conservative named Paul Weyrich who in 1980 told a group of evangelicals “I don’t want everybody to vote,” “As a matter of fact, our leverage in elections goes up as the number of voters goes down.” (Rolling Stone Magazine, 2012)
Every since the 2010 elections a conservative advocacy group which was founded by Weyrich, has led the GOP effort in curtailing and disrupting voting rights very effectively. In a widespread systematic effort the American Legislative Exchange Council funded in part by the Koch brothers, the billionaires who funded the Tea Party, 38 states have introduced bills this year that are set up to keep voters from voting at almost every level of the process.
So far the damage report shows a dozen states that have approved road blocks to voting. That’s right a dozen states have passed laws to keep voters from voting, this is happening in 2012. The voter suppression effort has even reached third-party organizations like the League of Women voters and the NAACP, since Florida and Texas have made it harder for them to help register voters. The state of Maine even repealed Election Day voter registration, which has been the law going back to 1973. Georgia, Florida, Ohio,, Tennessee, and West Virginia have all cut short the period for early voting.
Florida and Iowa have excluded all ex-convicts from ever voting, which means literally thousands of voters that were able to vote before now can’t vote. It gets even more interesting when you consider the fact that six states controlled by republican governors and legislators – Kansas, Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin will require government issued identification before any ballot can be cast. That’s significant when you consider the other interesting fact that 10 percent of the public doesn’t have such identification. The numbers are higher among traditional Democratic constituencies – 18 percent among young voters and a whopping 25 percent of African-Americans. (Rolling Stone Magazine, 2012)
Add all these conservative initiatives together and the Democratic vote could be dampened enough to shift the outcome to the GOP. President Clinton told a group of young activists in July, 2011 that he hadn’t seen such a coordinated effort to curtail the vote since the days of the poll tax and Jim Crow laws. Republicans claim they are trying to curtail voter fraud – this coming from the party that won the 2000 election by less than 2,000 votes – and Bush declaring war on voter fraud upon taking office.
Republicans claim there was massive voter fraud by community organizations like ACORN which they say was registering fake voters. Of the more than 300 million votes cast between 2002 and 2007, Bush administration prosecutors convicted only 86 people for voter fraud most of whom were immigrants and former felons who were unaware of their eligibility to vote.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder says the Justice Department will prevent any efforts to water down provisions of the Voting Rights Act, which some states have in fact sued in court to do claiming some of the provisions passed in 1965 are not needed in 2012. If you believe that I got a bridge I wanna sell you.
References
Rolling Stone
Alternet.org