The New Jim Crow, And The Disenfranchisement Of America

Since the start of the year, Republicans have been waging an unprecedented campaign against the voting rights of the poor and elderly, not to mention college students, African Americans and Hispanics. Backed by the American Legislative Council and the duplicitous Koch brothers, Republicans have managed to introduce (and in some cases pass) legislation in over 30 states that would effectively

• Eliminate same-day voter registration, which, if it had been eliminated before the last election four years ago, would have disenfranchised 60,000 voters in the state of Maine alone.
  
  
• Require state-issued IDs, birth certificates, marriage licenses, immigration/naturalization papers and/or tribal identification documents to vote, while excluding university IDs.
  
  
• Ban early voting on Sunday, which would impact those African Americans who in the past relied on their churches to transport them to their local board of elections on Sunday.
  
  
• Limit absentee voting, which would affect the millions of Americans who are too busy working 2 or 3 jobs and taking care of their families to show up and vote in person.

Why all the hoopla? Republicans claim its all an attempt to crack down on voter fraud, despite the fact that between 2002 and 2007, only 86 out of 300 million Americans were convicted of voter fraud. In fact, according to election law expert Tovah Andrea Wang, "voter fraud at the polling place is virtually nonexistent."

The plain and simple truth is that the Republicans are merely trying to disenfranchise as many Americans as possible -- especially those Americans who are more likely to vote for Democrats.

Take for instance Dorothy Cooper, a 96-year-old African American woman who brought her voter registration card, her birth certificate, a rent receipt, a copy of her lease and her birth certificate to the Cherokee Boulevard Driver Service Center in Chattanooga, Tennessee, only to be rebuffed because she was missing her marriage license.

Then there's the case of Virginia Lasater, a 91-year-old Tennessee woman who has voted for seven decades without difficulty, but is considering not voting next year because she could not physically handle standing in line at her local licensing bureau for hours upon hours.

The crazy thing is that it's not even 2012 yet. I cannot begin to imagine the number of complaints that will begin popping up all across the country as the election season nears. In the meantime, all we can do is watch patiently in the background and hope that our trusted democratic leaders are able to hold back this assault on our most precious American right.