NAACP

by Jeremy Leaming

Earlier in the week the rightwing push for new restrictions on voting received support of a Pennsylvania state court judge, who failed to see how the state’s strict voter ID law could keep people from the polls. But the effort in Florida to curtail voting opportunities, also led by conservative policymakers, found resistance late yesterday from a federal court in D.C. that concluded the state’s measure to limit earlier voting opportunities disproportionally targeted African-Americans.

Like a string of other statehouses, mostly controlled by Republicans, Florida lawmakers implemented an overhaul of voting procedures in the state, which included rigid voter ID requirements, an attempt to hamper voter registration drives and limitations on early voting opportunities. Fla. Gov. Rick Scott has also urged county officials to purge voter rolls. The Department of Justice and several civil liberties groups have challenged the efforts to restrict voting, and five counties in Florida must get pre-clearance from the DOJ or a federal court before making changes to voting procedures. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibits several states and localities with histories of voter discrimination from altering voting procedures without federal pre-clearance.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled late Thursday that curtailing early voting opportunities in Hillsborough, Monroe, Collier, Hardee and Hendry counties would have a discriminatory impact on black voters.

The three-judge panel concluded, in part, that the “state has failed to satisfy its burden of proving that those changes will not have a retrogressive effect on minority voters.” The panel added that restricting early-voting is “analogous to closing polling places in disproportionately African-American precincts.”  

Ryan P. Haygood, director of the Political Participation Group at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, one of the group’s challenging Florida’s restrictions on voting said in a statement regarding the litigation that implementation of the measures “would be devastating for Black and other minority voters in the state.”

by Jeremy Leaming

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s Department of Justice has launched investigations of efforts by a string of state governors to make voting a major difficulty for potential voters, especially minorities, the poor, students and the elderly.

Today, before the NAACP Annual Convention, Holder delved into his commitment to safeguard the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and in the process tore into the tawdry efforts by states, such as Texas, to limit the right to vote.

In prepared text of his speech, Holder focused on the onerous Texas voter ID law, which the DOJ has not granted approval of. “After close review, the Department found that this law would be harmful to minority voters – and we rejected its implementation,” Holder said.

He continued, “Under the proposed law, concealed handgun licenses would be an acceptable form of photo ID – but student IDs would not. Many of those without IDs would have to travel great distances to get them – and some would struggle to pay for the documents they might need to obtain them.”

According to the AP, Holder veered off script and said, “We call those poll taxes,” which are unconstitutional.