The nation’s oldest civil rights organization, NAACP has brought voting barriers to a national discussion this week with the release of an expansive report that identifies voter suppression efforts and a call to the UN “to look at what is a coordinated campaign to disenfranchise persons of color.”
The report, Defending Democracy: Confronting Modern Barriers to Voting Rights in America, notes that the 2008 elections “marked an historic moment in the racial composition of the American electorate.” In particular, the historic racial disparity in turnout between White voters and Black voters was “nearly eliminated” in the 2008 elections while the 2010 Census indicated communities of color were expanding.
“In the face of far-reaching demographic and electoral trends revealing unprecedented minority political mobilization in America, an assault on voting rights accelerated in 2011. In this year alone, over a dozen states imposed obstacles to voting at each key stage of the democratic process.
These restrictive voting measures will have a disproportionate impact on minority, low-income, disabled, elderly, and young voters, and threaten to substantially undermine the political strength already harnessed by minority communities during the 2008 Presidential Election.”
The restrictive measures entail restricting voter registration, reducing early voting, and tightening voter ID requirements. These laws, the NAACP says, have a disproportionate impact on the minority electorate.
“The main thrust of these efforts, however, is not distributed evenly throughout the country. The states that have passed these restrictions are, in many cases, the very same states that experienced high rates of minority population growth and political participation over the last decade.
For example, block the vote efforts are proliferating in three states that together account for nearly 22% of all African-American voters in 2008: Georgia (1,334,000), Texas (1,253,000), and Florida (1,026,000). Moreover, the eight states that had turnout rates of more than 70% of their eligible African-American voters—Nevada, Missouri, Maryland, Mississippi, South Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio—are all participants in this block the vote campaign.
Similarly, among eligible Latino voters, two of the states that have seen some of the most aggressive block the vote efforts—Texas and Florida—accounted for 30% of all Latino votes cast in 2008; the three states that had more than 60% of their eligible Latino voters turn out to vote (as compared to a national rate of 50%) — Florida, North Carolina, and Maryland—are also a part of these restrictive voting efforts.”
Read Defending Democracy: Confronting Modern Barriers to Voting Rights in America.