Monday, October 3, 2011

New Voting Restrictions?

Because the GOP controls many of the state governments, they are enforcing new laws of voting to prevent voter fraud (which as mentioned in the article is very rare) in reality, it seems as if there are other motives, i.e. attempts to stop poor /minority voters from voting. This is possible because these new laws make voting take a lot longer than usual which unfortunately will discourage working class people with busy schedules to not go out and vote, usually for democrat candidates. Republicans are doing this because they know that Obama is extremely powerful in that he has the power to "get more people to vote. In 2008, when he won the presidency he literally "rocked the vote" due to the fact that so many people who had never voted before actually went out to the polls and voted for him. These new laws remind me of voting restrictions in the south during the civil rights era.

3 comments:

Mitchell Tam said...

I agree with Lexi in that this reminds me of the voting restrictions before the civil rights act. Literacy tests and poll taxes were used to discourage black people from voting. These new laws seem like they are aimed at making voting a little bit more difficult, especially for those that identify with the Democrat party. However the article did say that the Supreme Court ruled that "...it found no evidence of the fraud the law was intended to combat, it also found no evidence that the new requirements were a burden on voters." Well either way we won't really know the effects until the 2012 elections!

Maegan Corti said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Maegan Corti said...

I agree with Lexi. These voting restrictions are similar to the Civil Rights Act. During the Civil Rights Act, they made pointless test so that those who are African American could not vote. Instead of African Americans, they are the poor people. These new ideas are making the voting system seem a little more difficult then they should be.