News (Noticias) Tagged ‘voting rights’

The secretary of state’s office counts more than 60,000 Hispanic voters in the state right now. It’s just 1.3 percent of the state’s active registered voters. But that’s more than double the 0.6 percent share of just four years ago. And voting rights groups keep registering more, in key counties.

“As of July 1, 2008, there are 12,219 Latino registered voters in Gwinnett County,” said Jerry Gonzalez of the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials.”*

Irving’s at-large voting system effectively allows white voters to block the election of Hispanic voters’ favored City Council candidates, according to new studies that are part of a federal voting rights lawsuit filed against the city.

The studies, released this week, said that there is at least one area in Irving that could serve as a single-member council district where a majority of residents are voting-age Hispanics. “*

On the eve of the 2004 presidential election, the Republican Party threatened to challenge the qualifications of 35,000 registered voters in Ohio, and went to court to secure their right to do so. For the most part, this turned out to be a smokescreen, or what Steven Rosenfeld has aptly called a “perfect football fake.” Not only did it force the Democratic Party to send its own voting rights advocates to inner-city polling places to defend the challenged voters, but it served as a distraction that allowed other methods of voter disenfranchisement to escape detection.”*

Modesto is paying $3 million to settle a voting rights lawsuit the city fought all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, one of the attorneys who won the case said Thursday.

Modesto will pay over three installments. It had set aside at least $500,000 because it anticipated owing the attorneys’ fees.

The money is going to pay the fees of the three law firms that argued the case on behalf of three Latino residents who claimed Modesto’s at-large City Council elections disenfranchised minority voters.”*

During an evening Memorial Day service in old San Juan, Hillary Clinton spoke of the unfairness in U.S. policy toward Puerto Ricans who risk their lives in the U.S. military and have their voting rights stripped when they return home to the island. Clinton called the action “an injustice and an insult.”

Clinton’s message on a day when Americans honor those service men and women who gave their lives in combat was simple: every U.S. citizen should be given a right to vote.

“I believe it is long past time that we give the people of Puerto Rico - United States citizens all - an equal voice in the vote for the commander-in-chief who sends young Puerto Ricans to war.” “*

Attorneys for the party made that argument in response to a lawsuit filed by the League of United Latin American Citizens and others that say the Texas system discriminates against Hispanics.

The party is not a state and thus is not covered by the Voting Rights Act, attorney Chad Dunn said Tuesday in explaining the party’s court filings.”*

The centrality of race — and, in particular, of the switch of Southern whites from overwhelming support of Democrats to overwhelming support of Republicans — is obvious from voting data.

For example, everyone knows that white men have turned away from the Democrats over God, guns, national security and so on. But what everyone knows isn’t true once you exclude the South from the picture. As the political scientist Larry Bartels points out, in the 1952 presidential election 40 percent of non-Southern white men voted Democratic; in 2004, that figure was virtually unchanged, at 39 percent.

More than 40 years have passed since the Voting Rights Act, which Reagan described in 1980 as “humiliating to the South.” Yet Southern white voting behavior remains distinctive. Democrats decisively won the popular vote in last year’s House elections, but Southern whites voted Republican by almost two to one.”*

Voting rights section chief John Tanner has apologized for saying earlier this month that “minorities don’t become elderly the way white people do: They die first.”

The apology went out to a number of attendees of the National Latino Congreso, where Tanner made the remarks. You can see one of them, to the president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, here. The letter is dated Friday, October 26, a week after Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) publicly called for Tanner to be fired based on those remarks.”*

“Earlier this month, the Department of Justice’s top official overseeing voting rights, John Tanner, made some insensitive comments about elderly and minority voters at a Latino forum in Los Angeles, raising eyebrows in the voting rights community and prompting Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama to call for his ouster on Friday.

But the greater outrage, according to civil rights lawyers across the country, is how the Department’s Voting Section has turned away from defending minorities that are seen as supporting Democrats — African Americans and Native Americans — while instead focusing on another minority that is seen as a Republican swing vote — Latinos.

“It may be cynical, but it may also be true,” said Julie Fernandes, senior policy analyst and special counsel for the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, “that the enforcement for Latinos has been more vigorous because they see it as more in their political interest — their partisan interest.”"*

“Project Vote releases a ground breaking report today called “Representational Bias in the 2006 Electorate.” The report by Douglass Hess of Project Vote finds a continuing problem with the U.S. electorate: those who are registered and vote are not representative of the overall U.S. population eligible to vote. The proportion of the U.S. population that registers to vote and that does vote is highly skewed towards Whites, the educated and the wealthy. Furthermore, young eligible Americans, particularly young minority males, and those who have recently moved, are disproportionately represented among those who do not participate in the U.S. electorate.

“This review of the survey data strongly points to the need for civic organizations and government officials (at all levels of government) to continue to expand access to voter registration,” says Hess. “For their part, governments should view bias in the electorate as a call to embrace voter registration as an affirmative responsibility through better implementation of laws relating to the registration of young, low-income and minority voters.”

“Representational Bias in the 2006 Electorate” is the first report to analyze just-released data on the 2006 election by the US Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS). Consistent with previous years, the report finds that electoral participation - both registration and voting - is stratified by social and economic factors, including age, income, education and race and ethnicity:

– A substantial majority of eligible Americans (52 percent) did not participate in the 2006 general election, either because they were not registered (32 percent) or because they were registered but did not vote (20 percent). Of those registered, however, the majority (71 percent) did vote. — Americans between 18 and 29 were approximately 20 percent of the eligible voter population but only 10 percent of the voting population in 2006. — In registration, non-Hispanic Blacks lagged behind non-Hispanic Whites by 10 percentage points: 61 percent to 71 percent. Only 54 percent of Latinos and 49 percent of eligible Asian-Americans report being registered. — In voting, non-Hispanic Blacks also lagged behind non-Hispanic Whites by 10 percentage points: 51 percent to 61 percent. Approximately 32 percent of eligible Latino and Asian-American citizens voted. — If all eligible minorities had voted at the rate of non-Hispanic Whites, more than 7.5 million additional Americans would have participated in the 2006 elections.

“The electorate does not reflect America’s voting eligible population,” says Project Vote Deputy Director Michael Slater. “Parties, candidates and organizations need to speak to the interests and values of all Americans not just White Americans or affluent Americans. Until they do, and until existing legal and administrative barriers are lowered, we will continue to see an electorate that is stratified by race, income and age.”

Project Vote calls on civic organizations and officials at all levels of government and throughout the political process to expand opportunities for participation in U.S. elections. Specifically, Project Vote continues to press officials to ensure that the Voting Rights Act, National Voter Registration Act and Help American Vote Act are implemented fully and fairly to reduce the bias that is so evident from this report.

For a copy of the report, please visit www.projectvote.org/, contact Sarah Massey at 202 445 1169 or sarah@masssey-media.com or Caroline Fan at 202 255 9906 or caroline@massey-media.com.

Project Vote is a national nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that promotes civic participation through research, guidance and technical assistance to voter participation and voting rights organizations.
Project Vote

CONTACT: Sarah Massey, +1-202-445-1169, sarah@massey-media.com, or
Caroline Fan, +1-202-255-9906, caroline@massey-media.com, both for Project
Vote

Web site: http://www.projectvote.org/”*

“Unbelievably, the Chief of the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division, U.S. Department of Justice, John Tanner, contends that while it’s “a shame” that elderly voters may be disenfranchised by new Photo ID restrictions at the polls because many don’t have driver’s licenses, minorities don’t have to worry quite as much. Why? Because “minorities don’t become elderly the way white people do. They die first.”

Yes, that’s what Tanner said last Friday at the National Latino Congreso in Los Angeles and The BRAD BLOG was in tow with video camera to prove it…

The NLC kicked off their 2nd Annual convention over the weekend, including an expert panel titled, “It’s Not Over - Defending the Right to Vote Against Disenfranchising Tactics.” While many issues were covered over the course of the 2 1/2 hour panel, the most hotly debated subject was the current rash of GOP-pushed Photo ID laws sweeping the nation, just in time for the 2008 Presidential Election.”