The new voting laws, and their effect Call To Action Please Read- MoPoDC

October 02, 2011

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• 2012

I told you this would happen.  Now is the time to get your  Id's &your information in line. Make Your Time on earth count for something. Help to prove these people wrong.   Stand & Unite For what's Right. 

The new voting laws, and their effect

The Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal legal think tank, has a new study out tonight that will likely set the Democratic agenda on the patchwork of mostly GOP-backed measures aimed at tightening registration and voter identification requirements before the 2012 election.

The study attempts to quantify the number of largely "young, minority, and low-income" -- that is, mostly Democratic -- voters who will find it "significantly harder" to cast ballots in 2012, and puts a figure on it: 5 million.

That top-line includes a number of different cases and arguments, and isn't really all that useful. It includes, for instance, between one and two million people who voted on early voting days eliminated by new laws in Florida, Ohio, and Georgia; I think it's reasonable to assume that many, if not most, of those people can find another day to vote. It also rolls in hundreds of thousands of people registered in 2008 in registration drives that won't be possible under new rules.

The harder -- and largest -- numbers are the ones concerning people who don't have the sort of ID -- like drivers licences -- required, and may not bother to make the extra effort to obtain special voting identification. (Again, not all of these people were ever going to vote, so the numbers are soft, but offer a sense of scale.)

Here's the study's summary of those, most of whom aren't in battleground states for national politics:

1. 3.2 million voters affected by new photo ID laws. New photo ID laws for voting will be in effect for the 2012 election in five states (Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin), which have a combined citizen voting age population of just under 29 million. 3.2 million (11 percent) of those potential voters do not have state-issued photo ID.... 

2. 240,000 additional citizens and potential voters affected by new proof of citizenship laws. New proof of citizenship laws will be in effect in three states (Alabama, Kansas, Tennessee), two of which will also have new photo ID laws. Assuming conservatively that those without proof of citizenship overlap substantially with those without state-issued photo ID, we excluded those two states. The citizen voting age population in the remaining state (Alabama) is 3.43 million; 240,000 (7 percent) of those potential voters do not have documentary proof of citizenship.

For presidential election purposes, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Alabama don't matter very much. 

And so another way to look at the study is that in the presidential election, ID laws in Wisconsin and laws restricting registration and early voting in Florida and Ohio will likely help the Republican nominee, at least on the margins. Laws making it harder for felons to regain the franchise in Florida and Iowa may have the same effect.