ARI BERMAN - The United States Is Becoming a Two-Tiered Country With Separate and Unequal Voting Laws
Phoebe Einzig-Roth, an
18-year-old freshman at Atlanta’s Emory University, moved to Georgia in August
and was excited to vote in her first election. But when she went to her polling
location near campus on Election Day, election officials told her she’d been
flagged as a noncitizen. Even though she’d brought three forms of
identification - her Massachusetts driver’s license, passport, and student
ID—she was forced to cast a provisional ballot.
Three days later, she
went to confirm her citizenship at the local election office, where she was
assured her vote would be counted. But she kept checking Georgia’s online “My
Voter Page” and there was no record it had been. She posted a picture of
herself on Facebook wearing an “I’m a Georgia Voter” sticker and wrote, “The
thing that infuriates me the most about voter suppression is not that it
happened to me, but that it happened, and is continuing to happen to thousands
of people all over the country, and most of the time, nothing is done to stop
people from being turned away at the voting polls.” She told me a few days
later, “I don’t believe my vote will count.”
Einzig-Roth was right
that she was far from alone. Voters in Georgia and other states faced onerous
barriers to performing their civic duty this year….
The stories are now
familiar: In Georgia, more than 750,000
voters were purged from the rolls over the past two years by Secretary
of State Brian Kemp, who was also the Republican candidate for governor. Some
voters near Atlanta waited more than four hours to cast ballots. In Florida,
more than 20,000 absentee ballots were rejected,
disproportionately from voters of color. In June, North Carolina’s Republican
Legislature passed a
law that contributed to a 20 percent decrease in early voting locations. Under
Texas’ voter ID law, people could vote with a gun permit but not a student ID.
Voter suppression
wasn’t limited to Southern states with a history of disenfranchising voters. In
North Dakota, 5,000 Native Americans living on reservations were initially
barred from voting because a new
law wouldn’t accept their P.O. boxes as valid addresses. Iowa
instituted a new voter ID law and reduced early voting. In Kansas, the lone
polling place in Dodge City, which is 59 percent Hispanic, was moved outside town,
a mile from the nearest public transportation… read more:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/11/the-united-states-is-becoming-a-two-tiered-country-with-separate-and-unequal-voting-laws-1/
