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Friday, August 25, 2006

PFAW Reports on New Voter Suppression Tactics

People For the American Way Foundation issued a report today that documents the recent spread of new regulatory, legislative, and administrative tactics that suppress votes.

“Jim Crow is being reincarnated as an entrenched bureaucrat or politician raising barriers to the ballot box, and it is becoming much harder for many Americans to exercise their right to vote. The barriers range from obvious to insidious to unintentional, and they are proliferating across the nation,” said PFAW Foundation President Ralph G. Neas. “Racial minorities, students, the poor and senior citizens are bearing the brunt of new rules and regulations that discourage and limit voting.”

The report, titled The New Face of Jim Crow: Voter Suppression in America, includes overviews of how the following policies and other emerging strategies are erecting new barriers to the ballot box:

• Overly strict voter identification requirements that make it harder for the up to 10 percent of Americans who do not have government-issued photo IDs to cast a vote;
• Burdensome voter registration rules that hobble the efforts of churches, community activists and nonprofits to register voters in traditionally disenfranchised communities, including minorities, students and immigrants;
• Provisional ballots that are cast, but often go uncounted—for example, more than one million provisional ballots went uncounted in 2004;
• Long lines and unequal distribution of resources at the polls, disproportionately affecting low-income neighborhoods;
• Felon disenfranchisement policies that make it difficult for men and women who have finished their sentences to regain voting rights and sometimes disenfranchise non-felons.