“Do not assume you are properly registered to vote,” warned Shaun King repeatedly. His wife went to vote with her registration card in her hand, and they said she couldn’t vote. King said some of the reasons that people are being turned away are nefarious.
Fifteen states close registration today, including Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Texas. States that do not have online registration: Arkansas, Michigan, Mississippi, and Texas.
A list of every state’s deadline and links to each state’s voting requirements was published by the New York Times.
King warns that voters may have been removed from voting lists, based on the last decade where Republicans have been changing voting laws (post-Obama’s election).
A study confirmed that 3.6 percent of registered white voters had no match in any state or federal ID database. By contrast, 7.5 percent of black registered voters were missing from those databases, which could mean hundreds of thousands of votes depending on the state.
“Whether it’s intended to harm 600,000 African American and Latino voters or 2 million, our concern is people are passing these laws with the intent to discriminate or the effect of discriminating,” says Deuel Ross, a civil rights attorney for the Legal Defense Fund.
Since 2013, a report from the United States Commission on Civil Rights noted, 61 lawsuits have alleged that election practices violated the Voting Rights Act, which bans discrimination. Only four were brought by the Justice Department, all under Obama.
A lawsuit forced Florida officials to provide Spanish-language sample ballots to thousands of Puerto Ricans devastated by Hurricane Maria in 2017. This year, the ACLU filed a federal lawsuit against Arizona for placing 500,000 voters at risk of disenfranchisement. In June, a federal judge struck down a Kansas law requiring proof of citizenship, a violation of the National Voter Registration Act. Suits have yet to be filed to rectify polling locations ill-equipped for people with disabilities.
To report any voting problems, you can text the word VOTE or VOTA for Spanish, to 81380, send a message to 1-850-909-8683 on WhatsApp, or visit Electionland.
Reader Question: Are you registered to vote
