The Year Of Voter Suppression

As we enter another election cycle, our most urgent challenge will be to ensure that the right to vote and the right to have that vote counted is protected. It comes as no surprise that this “basic right, without which all others are meaningless” has come under massive attack as we prepare to re-elect the first Black POTUS, who was swept into office by voters of color, youth and women.

Voter suppression efforts take a variety of forms. Certainly there are the blatant efforts to legislatively restrict access to the franchise via legal barriers such as recent changes that require voter identification and documentation of citizenship, limit early and absentee voting, make voter registration more difficult and further restrict the voting rights of former felons. These tactics are favored by the right, and disproportionately impact communities of color particularly African Americans, Latino/as and American Indians. Recent research of felony disenfranchisement alone, for example, indicates thatfelony disenfranchisement and the over-representation by race has already and will continue to impact the outcome of both national and state-level elections. In all cases, Republicans benefit.

Voter suppression occurs in less direct ways as well, and again these tactics are primarily those of the right, but are occasionally stoked by the disaffected left. Examples here include relentlessly negative campaigning which reduces voter turn-out, thinly coded appeals to racial fears, and calls to sit out elections, or vote third party in protest.

More