Holder Urges States to Repeal Bans on Felon's Voting

The good folks at the Justice and Accountability Center of Louisiana are working on similar issues locally. One of their projects is a Ban the Box campaign in which employers would not be able to learn of their applicants' recorders until after initial interviews and screens.

From The New York Times:
  

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Tuesday urged states to repeal laws that prohibit felons from voting, a move that would restore the right to vote to millions of people.

The call was mostly symbolic — Mr. Holder has no authority to enact these changes himself — but it marked the attorney general’s latest effort to eliminate laws that he says disproportionately keep minorities from the polls. “It is unwise, it is unjust, and it is not in keeping with our democratic values,” Mr. Holder said at civil rights conference at Georgetown University. These laws deserve to be not only reconsidered, but repealed.”

 

African-Americans represent more than a third of the estimated 5.8 million people who are prohibited from voting, according to the Sentencing Project, a research group that favors more liberal sentencing policies. And in Florida, Kentucky, and Virginia, more than one in five African-Americans has lost the right to vote.

 

The United States is unique in the democratic world for barring people from voting in such large numbers. Mr. Holder said the laws stemmed from the late 1800s, when states tried keep blacks from voting.

Breakdown of the Popular Vote by Precinct

Democrats and Non-Whites Experience Longer Voter Lines

I'm not in the least bit surprised by this.  Courtesy of TalkingPointsMemo. We can critique the source of the study all we want, but lets not pretend that these changes in voting polices don't have any real effect and that it's not random.  Plus, we should pay attention to who's calling for shorter early voting periods. Nobody's gonna support policy that hurts their own parties or groups.  This needs to be fixed.  Plus, I always wondered why election day is not a national holiday.  Seems like it's important enough to warrant time off so we can take care of our civic duties.

Disenfranchising Citizens for Political Purposes: Conservatives Seek More Hurdles to Voting

I've been wanting to post something about this for the last day or two, but I just couldn't muster up the energy to do it.  Sometimes learning of things like this is so disheartening that it just sucks the energy out of me, despite how important it is for people to be aware of it.  Political scientists and sociologists have noted for years now that a more engaged citizenry usually translates into more votes for democrats (less so now because of the ideological shift to the right over the past 30-years) and third party candidates.  Political savvy folks know this too.  If more voters threatens your political ideology, and you have no morals or soul then you have a vested interest in decreasing the number of voters.  That's what's going on here.  It's despicable and embarrassing that in the 21st century we have people actively seeking to deny others the right to vote.