The Brennan Center for Justice

by Jeremy Leaming

Attorney General Eric Holder, earlier this week, signaled he is ready to challenge the efforts some states are taking to limit voting. Holder, in his speech at the LBJ presidential library, said states should take action to encourage more voters, not create barriers to participation in democracy.  

“In 1965, when President Johnson signed the landmark Voting Rights Act into law, he proclaimed that, ‘the right to vote is the basic right, without which all others are meaningless,’” Holder said.

“Since January,” Holder continued, “more than a dozen states have advanced new voting measures. Some of these new laws are currently under review by the Justice Department, based on our obligations under the Voting Rights Act. Texas and South Carolina, for example, have enacted laws establishing new photo identification requirements that we’re reviewing. We are also examining a number of changes that Florida has made to its electoral process, including changes to the procedures governing third-party voter registration organizations, as well as changes to early voting procedure, including the number of days in the early voting period.”

Michael Waldman, executive director of the Brennan Center for Justice, lauded Holder’s comments, saying, “We hope the Justice Department will enforce the law and protect the voting rights of all Americans in its assessment of new voting laws.” The Center’s “Voting Law Changes in 2012,” report released earlier this fall says the new restrictions could bar more than 5 million Americans from participating in next year’s elections.

Efforts by federal lawmakers to look into the onerous voting regulations picked up earlier this fall, when Reps. John Conyers Jr., Jerrold Nadler and House Democratic Whip Steny H. Hoyer urged congressional hearings into the laws and sent letters to state officials calling on them to oppose “new state measures adopted over the last year that would make it harder for eligible voters to register or vote.”

Sens. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) this week joined the effort to counter the states’ restrictive voting measures, which have been pushed largely by Republican state lawmakers to dampen voter turnout of minorities. The senators introduced a bill this week that would “create tough new criminal and civil penalties for those who create and distribute false and deceptive voting information and campaign literature,” a press release issued from Cardin’s office states.

by Jeremy Leaming

Leading House Democrats are urging the Judiciary Committee to conduct a hearing on a raft of new state laws that they say could bar millions of voters from participating in next year’s general election.

Citing a recent report examining the new laws, passed primarily by Republican-controlled statehouses, Reps. John Conyers Jr., ranking member of the Committee on the Judiciary, and Jerrold Nadler, ranking member of the Subcommittee on the Constitution, are calling on Republican Chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary Lamar Smith to “schedule hearings soon to address an issue so critical to our democracy.”

The lawmakers’ letter cites a report issued earlier this month by the Brennan Center for Justice that concludes that the set of new stringent voter registration laws could affect “more than 5 million voters ….” As The New York Times reported in early October, the Brennan Center study said the new laws “could make it significantly harder for more than five million eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012.”

Many Republicans have long claimed that stricter voter registration laws are needed to confront rampant voter fraud. But the Brennan Center and Reps. Conyers (pictured) and Nadler say there is no evidence that such fraud exists.

The Brennan Center’s Executive Director Michael Waldman told The Times that the new laws are really intended to make it much more difficult for African Americans, young and poor voters to cast ballots in the 2012 presidential election. Waldman said the new laws represent “the most significant rollback in voting rights in decades.”

In a column for Slate, Dahlia Lithwick and University of Virginia law school professor Risa L. Goluboff note the “ugly parallels between Jim Crow and modern vote-suppression laws.”

The letter from Conyers and Nadler noted that the provisions requiring photo identification, excluding common forms of identification, such as student IDs and social security cards, and requiring proof of citizenship raise the “most serious concerns.”

Citing the Brennan Center report called “Voting Law Changes in 2012,” the congressmen say the new voting law changes “will have a particularly significant impact on minority voters. The report concluded that African American and Hispanic voters were more likely to take advantage of early voting opportunities and register to vote through the types of voter registration drives now curtailed or eliminated by the new laws.”

The two continue:

Most critically, the Report noted that many of the new voter identification laws do not allow voters to present many forms of identification frequently used by minorities, the elderly, and the young. For example, the new Texas law allows for the use of a concealed carry gun permit to vote, but fails to recognize student IDs, Texas Veterans’ Administration identification and event Congressional identification. Further, Texas citizens must also spend $22 to obtain a birth certificate or up to $145 to obtain a passport to present the documentation necessary to acquire a form of ID required to cast a ballot.

The letter also cites examples “of the anti-democratic impact of these new laws….” The two report, for example, that under Tennessee’s new voter registration law a 96-year old woman was denied a voter registration card because her birth certificate included her maiden name, “rather than her married name.”

See the lawmakers’ entire letter here.