| North Carolina’s Moral Mondays (Slate) |
By Joseph M. Schwartz
(This is the second part of a two-part article. Find Part One here)
3. Voter Suppression: A Major Threat to Democracy in the United States
The Democrats should run against Republicans on the grounds that they are a party that is hostile to democracy. Republican voter restriction laws in 14 states potentially disenfranchise 11 percent of the electorate due to their lack of official government IDs. These are new poll taxes, since lower-income people often cannot take time off from work or afford the fees to purchase official government voter ID cards. Nate Silver of the blog 538 estimates that voter ID restrictions may repress turnout by as much as 2.4% (disproportionately students, the poor, the elderly and blacks and Latinos).
Ari Berman of The Nation and Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center for Justice have done preliminary analyses of the effect of voter exclusion laws on the 2014 elections. Their analysis should motivate progressives to prioritize organizing to overturn voter restrictions. In Kansas, slash-and-burn tax-and-budget cutter Republican Governor Sam Brownback defeated Democratic challenger Paul Davis by only 33,000 votes. Yet 24,000 Kansans tried to register this year unsuccessfully because they failed to present the documentary proof of citizenship now required of state law. An earlier study by the non-partisan federal General Accountability Office found that new voter ID laws reduced turnout by two percent in 2012 in Arkansas and three percent in Tennessee.
Source: Lessons for the Left from the 2014 Elections: Part Two
