Health & Fitness
Republicans Welcome Back Jim Crow
Millions of Americans across the country are losing their legitimate right to vote.
With the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, our country turned the page on a sad chapter of racial discrimination and voter suppression.
In the nearly 50 years since, the United States has largely continued on a trajectory of reform and progress. Additional federal laws have streamlined and safeguarded the voter registration process, significantly expanded ballot box access, and increased political participation by traditionally underrepresented voters.
We witnessed the culmination of these positive changes in the 2008 presidential election – which had the largest and most demographically diverse electorate in U.S. history. Now, with the 2012 election fast approaching, Republicans are doing everything in their power to turn back the clock on this progress for political purposes.
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As the Democratic National Committee recently outlined in a new report, “A Reversal in Progress: Restricting Voting Rights for Electoral Gain,” in 40 different states across the nation GOP governors and state legislators have proposed and passed restrictions on voting. Their efforts make it more difficult to register, reduce the availability of early voting, and place new qualifications on voters — like obtaining limited types of government-issued photo identification.
These restrictive measures have one thing in common: They make it harder to vote — specifically for minority voters.
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Millions of Americans register through voter registration drives – and minority voters do so at twice the rate of white voters. Eleven percent of Americans lack the photo id these new laws require – and that rate is far higher in some communities. For example, 25 percent of African-Americans and 19 percent of Latinos lack a government-issued photo ID.
Many of the Republicans’ strongest efforts to restrict voting, the report highlights, have been made in states intensely competitive in 2008: Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Missouri. The political implications of these attempts to restrict voting rights are clear.
