Republican Voter Suppression Efforts Are Targeting Minorities, Journalist Says

[red dog 1]

Fresh Air
NPR
October 23, 2018


Since the 2010 election, 24 states have implemented new restrictions on voting.
Alabama now requires a photo ID to cast a ballot.
Other states, like Ohio and Georgia, have enacted "use-it-or-lose" laws, which strike voters from registration rolls if they haven't participated in an election within a prescribed period of time.

"Mother Jones" journalist Ari Berman, author of "Give Us the Ballot," says that many of the restrictions are part of a broader Republican strategy to tighten access to the ballot --
an effort that was bolstered in 2013 by the Supreme Court's "Shelby County v Holder" ruling.

[That] decision, Berman explains, "said that those states with the longest histories of discrimination no longer had to approve their voting changes with the federal government."

As a result, Berman says, "You're seeing a national effort by the Republican Party to try to restrict voting rights, and it's playing out in states all across the country."

Many of the new voting restrictions are occurring in states like Georgia, North Dakota and Kansas, that have critical races in the 2018 election.
Berman says that it's still unclear what the impact of the restrictions will be on the upcoming election, but he remains hopeful that the tide might be shifting on voter restrictions.

Read more - Listen to Terry Gross' interview with Ari Berman:
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/23/659784277/republican-voter-suppression-efforts-are-targeting-minorities-journal

[gratuitous]

1. A headline truly written for the low information citizen

Not blaming NPR or anyone else, but it's astonishing that such a simple sentence needs to be spelled out (though it's softened by the "journalist says" ending - would NPR headline a story "Water is wet, scientist says"?).

[red dog 1]

2. I'm not sure I agree

It's not the headline I would have chosen, but it does state clearly what Ari Berman said in the interview.

[qwlauren35]

3. I think it's important

to understand how it works.

For example, the "Exact Name" law in Georgia is likely to impact African-Americans with unusual apostrophes in their names, like D'Jaris or D'ona, which may get misspelled.

The North Dakota law requires a street name to register, but most Native Americans don't live on streets and use PO Boxes.

The "Use-it-or-Lose-It" laws obviously target the occasional (every 4 years) voter, especially those who haven't voted since 2012 for Obama.

At face value, these laws "make sense" to the people who aren't affected, and you have to hit them over the head to get them to see that these are laws that target a certain population, a certain demographic, and almost always Democrats.

When the Supreme Court decided that states no longer had to be policed about voting rights, I saw this coming. It is one of the reasons why I joined the ACLU.

It's going to be up-hill to convince the average person that these laws disenfranchise legitimate voters.