(MintPress) — “From Sojourner Truth, to Shirley Chisholm to First Lady Michelle Obama, black women have been fighting over voting rights for many, many years. Sadly, this willingness to fight is crucial even in 2012,” writes political analyst Zerlina Maxwell in Ebony magazine.
Maxwell notes that while black women voters played a crucial role in the historic election of the nation’s first president of color, this year the voting rights of many Americans, including black women, are under attack, as several states across the U.S. are slated to vote on laws which would not allow a person to cast a ballot unless they are able to provide identification.,
Critics of the legislation argue that it is being introduced by Republican-controlled legislatures across the U.S. as a way to disenfranchise liberal-leaning voters. Proponents say the legislation is needed to keep elections honest.
However, experts say the laws, if passed, will affect communities of color on a greater scale than their white counterparts, particularly African-Americans.
But women in the U.S. are taking a proactive stand to insure that everyone has a voice in the political process.
Black communities hit the hardest by voter ID laws
For African-Americans, 25 percent — or 5.5 million voting-age black Americans — could be turned away at the polls for being undocumented and unphotographed.
“Black women had the highest voter turnout of any group in 2008, when some 69 percent of black women who were eligible to vote did so,” Maxwell says.
“Thus, sisters are an essential component to an Obama victory again this year. Unsurprisingly, black women are also among those groups more likely to be impacted by voter ID laws in the battleground states this year.” But many community activists have seen the writing on the wall and have been moved to mitigate potential outcomes of voter ID laws.
“The story, however, is not as much what happens at the polls when the wrong ID is used as it is what happens when people don’t bother showing up at the polls at all because they think they don’t qualify due to lack of identification,” Brentin Mock, a New Orleans-based journalist who serves as Colorlines.com’s Reporting Fellow on Voting Rights, covering the challenges presented by new voter ID laws, suppression of voter registration drives and other attempts to limit electoral power of people of color writes.
“The U.S. has a long history of voting shenanigans, from Jim Crow era poll taxes to current era rumors circulated, often exclusively in black communities, about who can and can’t vote. Come this November, during the general election, the impacts of the new laws will begin to surface. Besides the eight states already holding strict voter ID laws, there are 31 more states lurking, hoping to do the same. At least eight of those states could pass voter ID laws before Election Day. And of the eight that already have strict voter ID laws, five want to pass legislation this year that would make them even stricter,” concludes Mock.
Disenfranchisement by the numbers
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, as many as 5 million eligible voters could meet difficulties this Election Day due to new voter laws. Studies show that as many as 11 percent of eligible voters do not have government-issued photo ID. That percentage is even higher for seniors, people of color, people with disabilities, low-income voters and students. Many citizens find it hard to get government photo IDs, because the underlying documentation like birth certificates (the ID one needs to get ID) is often difficult or expensive to come by.
“Other groups like Native Americans, transgendered people, newly divorced, newly married couples or people who’ve recently lost their homes could all have information on their drivers licenses that reflect names, addresses and faces that aren’t current. The costs for these groups will be more than an inconvenience: fees for new birth and marriage certificates, hours lost waiting in lines for updated materials and transportation costs to handle it all,” ColorLines News reports.
Voter ID laws have been controversial in the U.S., where laws against any form of poll tax are on the books.
Voting rights must be extended freely and without monetary cost to every legally eligible voter according to federal law. While several state governments where voter ID laws exist pay for and distribute free voter IDs to help them comply with this measure, there are sometimes other costs associated with obtaining copies of the required documentation in order to obtain these voter IDs.
Still, many people across the country are speaking out and working to combat the measures. In Ohio, Deidra Reese, coordinator of the Columbus-based Ohio Unity Coalition, an affiliate of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation has been going door-to-door for months, fighting back against voter ID laws.
Women leading the way in voting
Reese has been looking up registrations on her iPad and making sure voters have proper ID in order to cast their ballots in November.
“Reese is part of a cadre of black women engaged in a revived wave of voting rights advocacy four years after the historic election of the nation’s first black president,” the Washington Post reports. “Provoked by voting law changes in various states, they have decided to help voters navigate the system — a fitting role, they say, given that black women had the highest turnout of any group of voters in 2008.”
David Bositis, senior research associate with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, told the Associated Press that African-American women, who number about 20 million in the U.S., have long been the largest group of Democratic voters in the country. In general, voter turnout in the U.S. is generally higher amongst women of all races than men.
Women seem to be leading the way in getting voters to the polls as well.
“We’ve forgotten our mothers went to three jobs, picked us up from school, put the macaroni and cheese on the table, got up and got somebody registered to vote,” Sheryl Lee Ralph, actress and wife of Pennsylvania state Sen. Vincent Hughes, recently stated at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual legislative conference in the nation’s capital.
Ralph was joined by first lady Michelle Obama and was one of several women who participated in a strategy session at the event in September.
“There are a number of community groups across the country taking on the important role of navigator to assist people with the new laws which might scare potential voters away this year. These groups, along with aggressive registration efforts by Obama for America (who have made the female voter a top priority), will surely be given a great deal of credit if President Obama wins a second term,” says Maxwell.