Suppress the Vote!
Ohio Republicans want to disqualify voters’ ballots for the mistakes poll workers make.
So much ink has been spilled on how vote suppression will affect the
2012 presidential election, one hesitates to write another word. Ari Berman has done terrific work
uncovering the ways in which the new voting laws have aimed at
suppressing the votes of elderly, minority, student, and other
voters—particularly in swing states—who tend to vote for Democratic
candidates. Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center for Justice
has an indispensible primer on the 22 new laws and two executive
actions that will severely restrict voting in 17 states in November.
These laws, often modeled on draft legislation from the American Legislative Exchange Council, a consortium of conservative state legislators, will
have the effect of disenfranchising millions of voters, all in order to
address a vote fraud “epidemic” that should be filed somewhere between
the Loch Ness Monster and the Tooth Fairy in the annals of modern fairy tales.
As Weiser notes, none of this is casual or accidental: “If you want to
find another period in which this many new laws were passed restricting
voting, you have to go back more than a century—to the
post-Reconstruction era, when Southern states passed a host of Jim Crow
voting laws and Northern states targeted immigrants and the poor.”
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