Voting laws pushed by GOP could affect millions
New York Times
by Michael Cooper
Monday, October 3, 2011

Since Republicans won control of many statehouses last November, more than a dozen states have passed laws requiring voters to show photo identification at polls, cutting back early voting periods or imposing new restrictions on voter registration drives.

With a presidential campaign swinging into high gear, the question being asked is how much of an impact all of these new laws will have on the 2012 race.

State officials, political parties, and voting experts have all said that the impact could be sizable. Now, a study being released today by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law has tried to tally just how many voters stand to be affected.

The center, which has studied the new laws and opposed some of them in court and other venues, analyzed 19 laws that passed and two executive orders that were issued in 14 states this year, and concluded that they "could make it significantly harder for more than 5 million eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012."

Republicans, who have passed almost all of the new election laws, say they are necessary to prevent voter fraud, and question why photo identification should be routinely required at airports but not at polling sites. Democrats counter that the new laws are a solution in search of a problem, since voter fraud is rare. They worry that the laws will discourage, or even block, eligible voters - especially poor voters, young voters and African American voters, who tend to vote for Democrats.

The Justice Department must review the new laws in several states to make sure that they do not run afoul of the Voting Rights Act.

"This year there's been a significant wave of new laws in states across the country that have the effect of cracking down on voting rights," said Michael Waldman, the executive director of the Brennan Center, who noted that 5 million votes would have made a difference in both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. "It is the most significant rollback in voting rights in decades."

Just how much of an impact the new laws will have is a matter of some dispute. Republicans note that states like Georgia and Indiana moved to require photo identification from voters and that turnout there improved.

Five states passed laws this year scaling back programs allowing voters to cast their ballots before election day, the Brennan Center found. Ohio passed a law eliminating early voting on Sundays, and Florida eliminated it on the Sunday before election day - days when some African American churches organized "souls to the polls" drives for members of their congregations. Maine voted to stop allowing people to register to vote on election day - a practice that had been credited with enrolling 60,000 new voters in 2008. Voters in Maine and Ohio are now seeking to overturn the new laws with referendums.

The biggest impact, the Brennan Center said, will be from laws requiring people to show government-issued photo identification to vote. Before this year, only Indiana and Georgia had strict photo identification requirements for voters, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. This year, five more states - Wisconsin, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas - passed laws to join their ranks.

The Brennan Center estimates that 11 percent of potential voters do not have state-issued photo identification. By that measure, it finds that the new laws would affect 3.2 million voters in the states where the change is scheduled to take effect before the 2012 elections.

This article appeared on page A - 7 of the San Francisco Chronicle

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