Wave Of New State Voting Restrictions Could Mean 5 Million Americans Won’t Be Casting A Ballot In November Elections

(photo illustration by The Texas Tribune)

Tuesday’s Iowa caucuses marked the first real and substantive votes in this year’s hotly contested presidential contest, the kickoff to what will be a year of wall-to-wall campaigning for the White House as well as thousands of other important positions across the country.

Tens of millions of voters will flock to the polls to make their pick this coming November in an event that is the very hallmark of our democracy. But the 2012 elections are going to be impacted  in an unprecedented manner by what transpired in dozens of states in 2011.

When the calendar hit January 1, the last of numerous pieces of legislation in the five states that actually passed new requirements demanding photo ID for voters to actually cast a ballot in 2012 took effect.

The laundry list of new laws enacted among the states in the past year was dominated by those that imposed strict new mandates on voter identification and access to the polls, forcing millions of citizens to acquire an official ID card or else lose their right to vote.

30 states now have laws mandating some form of voter identification that are going to dramatically restrict access to voting in a way not seen since the middle of the last century. Legislatures packed with conservative lawmakers in states like Texas, South Carolina, Tennessee and two others passed bills imposing new requirements for ID in order to cast a ballot, leading to cries of disenfranchisement among minorities and an avalanche of legal challenges from ordinary citizens and the federal government.

Experts predict more lawsuits to come in 2012 that are tied to 2011′s frenetic pace of voting ID laws .

Millions more Americans will be required to show photo identification when they head to the polls in four states in 2012, headlining the welter of new laws across the nation that take effect with the turn of the year.

Kansas, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Texas will require voters to prove their identities at the ballot box, bringing the total number of states that require some form of voter identification to 30, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, a bipartisan group that provides research and data to state governments.

The voter ID measures are among a large number of new state laws that also reflect concerns related to illegal immigration, employment and the well-being of the country’s youth. An estimated 40,000 new laws were passed in 2011, up 29% from the previous year.

“Voter ID was definitely a hot issue, and the debate around it was close to boiling over,” says Meagan Dorsch, the NCLS’s director of public affairs. “I think that in 2012 we could be looking at a flurry of lawsuits over voter ID laws passed in 2011.”

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“The big picture trend is restrictions on voting, frankly, in a way I think we haven’t seen in decades,” says Lawrence Norden, a legal expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, a New York University-based think tank whose lawyers are involved in an ongoing lawsuit involving voter-registration drives in Florida.

With the 2012 races shaping up to be tightly contested in an era of stark political divisions, election outcomes could very well be changed thanks solely to voter ID laws that will wipe out the ability of millions of Americans to exercise their constitutional right to cast a ballot.

A study by the Brennan Center for Justice that looked at 21 new laws or executive orders mandating ID at the polls or otherwise placing new restrictions voting  found that as many as 5 million Americans could be disenfranchised and  barred from voting in 2012. These restrictions include voter ID laws as well as legislation and orders that limit things like early voting, potentially wiping out 2 million votes that were cast in 2008.

The impact of these laws is poised to be mind-boggling. States with restrictive new voting laws account for a staggering 171 votes in the Electoral College, more than 60 percent of the total needed to win a presidential election.

More than five million Americans in total could face an uphill battle to the ballot box after states’ efforts to restrict voting rights in the past year, according to the first comprehensive study on such laws.

The Brennan Center for Justice finds that at least 19 laws and two executive orders were enacted thus far in the most recent legislative session that restricted voters’ rights by requiring photo ID, making changes to early or absentee voting options, or making the registration process more difficult.

Voter ID laws could disenfranchise 3.2 million voters while proof of citizenship laws could affect another 240,000 citizens. And as many as 2 million Americans voted on days in 2008 that have been eliminated under laws cutting back on non-Election Day voting.

The report paints a troubling picture for the impact of Voter ID and other such laws on upcoming elections. While threatening to disenfranchise millions—particularly youth, students, the elderly, the low-income, the disabled—the laws could also impact the make-up of elected officials nationwide.

States with laws that restrict voting rights will contribute 171 electoral votes during the 2012 presidential election—63 percent of the 270 votes necessary to win the election. And nearly half—five of twelve—“likely battleground states” have enacted such laws.

Justification for almost all of the laws mandating voter ID is that requiring some form of official government identification cuts down on what is usually described as “rampant” voter fraud. The data puts that argument in joepardy. The same Brennan Center report found virtually no history of serious voter fraud in the United States, and no cases that would have been prevented by requiring ID at the polls.

Even as 2012 begins, more states are seeking to join the 30 that have introduced legislation on voter identification. Virginia lawmakers are rapidly moving ahead with plans to place strict curbs on the ability to vote in the commonwealth. The legislation would mandate voter ID at the polls for this coming election and force state residents without proper identification to cast provisional ballots that will not count towards the official returns.

Republican proponents of the Virginia legislation raise the frighrni g spcter of mass voter fraud, claiming that people are taking advantage of Virginia’s lack of an ID requirement and going “from polling place to polling place” casting multiple votes. Critics say the law would prevent students and minorities from being able to vote.

While lawmakers across the country are eagerly passing voter ID legislation and implementing the new restrictions in time for the 2012 elections, legal ramifications of the nationwide ID frenzy are beginning to become reality. Civil lawsuits are picking up, and the federal government has fired its first salvo against the wave of ID laws.

Early last month, the Justice Department rejected South Carolina’s new voter ID law that was passed in 2011. Large numbers of the state’s significant minority population have been disenfranchised since the law took effect, leading the federal government to step in and seek to block the law under civil rights-era guideline for African American voting rights.

The Justice Department on Friday rejected South Carolina’s law requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls, saying it makes it harder for minorities to cast ballots. It was the first voter ID law to be refused by the federal agency in nearly 20 years.

The Obama administration said South Carolina’s law didn’t meet the burden under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which outlawed discriminatory practices preventing blacks from voting. Tens of thousands of minorities in South Carolina might not be able to cast ballots under South Carolina’s law because they don’t have the right photo ID, Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez said.

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“Minority registered voters were nearly 20 percent more likely to lack DMV-issued ID than white registered voters, and thus to be effectively disenfranchised,” Perez wrote, noting that the numbers could be even higher since the data submitted by the state doesn’t include inactive voters.

The number of active and inactive voters that should be used to determine how many people would be affected by the law has been in dispute. Department of Motor Vehicles executive director Kevin Shwedo said the state Election Commission knew it was using inaccurate data when it released reports showing nearly 240,000 active and inactive voters lacked driver’s licenses or ID cards.

Voting rights advocates don’t expect the government’s actions against South Carolina to have much of an impact on the other states that have either passed new voter ID laws or are moving ahead with legislation that would require them.

Also taking issue with the wave of new voting laws is the NAACP, accusing state lawmakers of targeting African Americans and Hispanics for “voter suppression” ahead of the November election. The organization filed a complaint with the United Nations in December that contends millions of minority citizens are having their right to vote impeded or taken away entirely by the new voting requirements.