Sweeping Voting Changes by GOP Makes it Harder for Grandma and Granpda to Vote
The elderly, the young and the poor are most effected by these changes because they have a harder time getting to the ballot box. For the under 30 crowd, many of them attend school away from their home town. The elderly have a harder time getting to their precincts because their age limits their movement (don’t drive, have no car, etc.). The poor don’t always have their own transportation either or cannot take time away from their jobs to vote.
All of these demographics are primarily Democrats.
The only way I can see around this underhanded tactic by the GOP is to find out if your state has changed its voting procedures and request an absentee ballot or don’t take chances and request one anyway.
Personally, I really dislike absentee voting. I love the voting experience. Yes, LOVE, despite the burden of long lines and rushing to the voting booth on a weekday. It’s really the only democratic right I enjoy participating in that makes me feel connected to my country. It’s the one right that Americans have died and struggled for. The one right many countries do not have. The one right women are not allowed to partake in other countries.
Please go to the article link here to be sure you get to all the links. I didn’t copy them below.
Are you still eligible to vote? Sweeping Voting Law Changes introduced by GOP
Ahead of the 2012 elections, a wave of legislation tightening restrictions on voting has suddenly swept across the country. More than five million Americans could be affected by the new rules already put in place this year — a number larger than the margin of victory in two of the last three presidential elections.
This report is the first full accounting and analysis of this year’s voting cutbacks. It details both the bills that have been proposed and the legislation that has been passed since the beginning of 2011.
* Download the Report (PDF)
* Download the Appendix (PDF), a compilation of potentially vote-suppressing legislation proposed in the 2011 legislative sessions.
* Download the Overview (PDF), a four-page summary with key findings.
* Read the Executive Summary
* View the ReportExecutive Summary
Over the past century, our nation expanded the franchise and knocked down myriad barriers to full electoral participation. In 2011, however, that momentum abruptly shifted.
State governments across the country enacted an array of new laws making it harder to register or to vote. Some states require voters to show government-issued photo identification, often of a type that as many as one in ten voters do not have. Other states have cut back on early voting, a hugely popular innovation used by millions of Americans. Two states reversed earlier reforms and once again disenfranchised millions who have past criminal convictions but who are now taxpaying members of the community. Still others made it much more difficult for citizens to register to vote, a prerequisite for voting.
These new restrictions fall most heavily on young, minority, and low-income voters, as well as on voters with disabilities. This wave of changes may sharply tilt the political terrain for the 2012 election. Based on the Brennan Center’s analysis of the 19 laws and two executive actions that passed in 14 states, it is clear that:
* These new laws could make it significantly harder for more than five million eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012.
* The states that have already cut back on voting rights will provide 171 electoral votes in 2012 – 63 percent of the 270 needed to win the presidency.
* Of the 12 likely battleground states, as assessed by an August Los Angeles Times analysis of Gallup polling, five have already cut back on voting rights (and may pass additional restrictive legislation), and two more are currently considering new restrictions.States have changed their laws so rapidly that no single analysis has assessed the overall impact of such moves. Although it is too early to quantify how the changes will impact voter turnout, they will be a hindrance to many voters at a time when the United States continues to turn out less than two thirds of its eligible citizens in presidential elections and less than half in midterm elections.
This study is the first comprehensive roundup of all state legislative action thus far in 2011 on voting rights, focusing on new laws as well as state legislation that has not yet passed or that failed. This snapshot may soon be incomplete: the second halves of some state legislative sessions have begun.