Sarah Solon

Speaking of disenfranchising vulnerable voters…Listen to Ezekiel Edwards in WBAI radio

When it comes to whittling away the voting rights of vulnerable voters, a new beast has been let out of its cage: voting laws requiring voters to show State issued IDs at the polls.

As printed in yesterday's New York Times article Stricter Voting Laws Carve Latest Partisan Divide, opinions about the efficacy of such laws run the gamut: Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado says that "noncitizens" committing voter fraud tip the balance in favor of a certain candidate in some districts, while election fraud experts say that undocumented immigrants avoid voting because they avoid interacting with government officials, even those running the polls.

But the most telling part of the article is its opening lines:

"Eva Charlene Steele, a recent transplant from Missouri, has no driver's license or other form of state identification. So after voting all her adult life, Mrs. Steele will not be voting in November because of an Arizona law that requires proof of citizenship to register.

'I have mixed emotions,' said Mrs. Steele, 57, who uses a wheelchair and lives in a small room in an assisted-living center. 'I could see where you would want to keep people who don't belong in the country from voting, but there has to be an easier way."

The House has passed a measure requiring voters to show State IDs at the polls. Now it's on its way to the Senate, where the measure will hopefully be stopped. It's not like the elderly, the poor, and minorities need more barriers between themselves and the polls.

While we're on the topic of governments going to great lengths to disenfranchise vulnerable voters, check out Ezekiel Edward's latest radio interview. Bright and early last Friday morning, Ezekiel was interviewed on WBAI radio discussing the Census' current practice of counting prison inmates (many of whom are permanently disenfranchised) as residents of the upstate districts where they're incarcerated, instead of as residents of the oftentimes downstate urban communities where they're from and where they will return.

As much as this might be about politics - counting prisoners as residents of the communities where they're incarcerated leads some upstate communities to have a great enough population to count as voting districts and thus to have elected representatives - it's more importantly about policy. When upstate communities become districts by counting their prison population as residents, they divert funding for social services away from the downstate urban communities that these inmates call home and often vote in ways that run directly counter to the needs and issues of the same downstate communities.

Click here to listen to Ezekiel on WBAI radio (Wakeup Call, 7:00am, Friday Sept. 22), and click here to read Ezekiel's recent op-ed in the Brooklyn Rail on the same topic.

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Posted at 8:05 AM, Sep 27, 2006 in Voting Rights
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