Aura Bogado

Voter ID Standoff Threatens New Hampshire’s Proud Turnout Record

Aura Bogado and Voting Rights Watch on June 23, 2012 - 9:35 AM ET

New Hampshire is notable for its high voter turnout, second only to Minnesota and Wisconsin in the 2008 elections, according to the US Elections Project at George Mason University. For a year, Governor John Lynch has tried to protect that legacy against the legislature’s attempt to pass a voter ID bill. He now appears ready to concede the point—if only the legislature would let him.

This week, Lynch was ready to compromise and sign off on a bill. But the version the state’s legislature presented was so excessively restrictive he vetoed the legislation Wednesday. Lawmakers are now preparing to vote on whether to override the governor’s veto on June 27.

It’s not the first time Lynch has vetoed a voter ID bill, and not the first time the legislature has threatened to overturn his decision. Last June, the governor vetoed a bill and declared that any eligible voter shouldn’t be denied the right to vote. Three months later, legislators attempted, but failed, to override the veto.

One Voter Suppression Law Isn't Good Enough in Michigan

Aura Bogado and Voting Rights Watch on June 19, 2012 - 2:40 PM ET

Michigan’s governor is poised to sign a set of three voter suppression bills approved by the House and the Senate—in a state that already has a voter ID law. A group of civil rights organizations testified against the bills last month, citing that the legislation would cause confusion for election supervisors and polling place workers, and that one bill in particular is “especially problematic for organizations operating registration drives.” Like Florida, Michigan is a good indicator of what other states may have in store: creating barriers against the participation of marginalized voters in major elections, before they even enter the polling site.

Less than two months shy of the state’s primary state election, SB 754 targets registration drives in two ways. First, the legislation stipulates photo ID for registration at government agencies. When authoring the so-called Motor Voter Act of 1993, which increases the government venues at which people can register to vote, Congress considered and rejected language to increase the requirements (such as photo ID) to register at government agencies. Federal circuit court decisions in 2005 and 2012 cemented Congress’s intent—but Michigan is still moving forward with the photo ID requirement.

But the bill also creates obstacles for civic participation, which will need to submit the personal information of each and every single volunteer, along with an affidavit that must be kept in file for a minimum of two years. Registering agents will have to be trained by the Secretary of State and are liable for stiff penalties if any of the bill’s numerous new procedures aren’t kept. Unfortunately for them, the bill doesn’t explain the training agents are expected to undergo, and doesn’t spell out the penalties. Once the bill is signed into law, voter registration groups will be too busy scrambling to figure out the bureaucracy and pleading with get volunteers to sign affidavits, rather than carry out their actual mission to register voters.

Fannie Lou Who? Why Voting Rights Still Matter

Aura Bogado and Voting Rights Watch on June 15, 2012 - 3:48 PM ET

I'm poring over notes created the last few weeks on my laptop, in my notebook and on scraps of paper, in order to explain why this blog exists. In short, Voting Rights 2012 is a collaborative effort between Colorlines.com and The Nation, to report on voter suppression. But that doesn’t explain why this blog exists. Brentin Mock will be writing the bigger picture story, looking at broader national trends from voter ID to voter suppression. Meanwhile, I’ll be augmenting with more of the day-to-day developments, as well working with community journalists, who will be our eyes and ears, since our little team can’t be everywhere at once. Now that I have it down in a short paragraph, it sounds simple enough. But it hardly begins to answer why we’re really here, or why anyone should want to follow our work.

Many readers of The Nation, who follow electoral trends and possess a tendency towards protecting voting rights, might wonder why their coveted magazine (and, increasingly, their online go-to site for political analysis) felt the need to pair up with a site that focuses on racial justice. Meanwhile, some Colorlines.com readers, who may be disenchanted with politics four years after a historic election that resulted in fewer gains for people of color than many hoped for, might wonder why their favorite daily news site is concerned with voting rights—an issue that seemingly only affirms the establishment (as a dear friend recently posted on Facebook, “the Republicrats will win no matter what”). And then, there’s Brentin and I, pressed to write for two intelligent yet not always overlapping audiences, and convince both that what we’re reporting is relevant.

Over the last few years, the narrative about voting rights has drastically changed. We know that the history of who can and cannot vote in the United States is fraught with discrimination against women, the poor and people of color. Some fifty years ago, Fannie Lou Hamer decided to risk her livelihood (to whatever extent sharecropping can be considered a livelihood) and her very life to fight against voter suppression. It was people like Hamer who saw the transformative possibilities attached in simply exercising one’s right to register to vote, and this is what eventually helped secure the Voting Rights Act.

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DOJ Adds to Pile of Lawsuits Over Florida’s Voter Purge

Aura Bogado on June 12, 2012 - 4:27 PM ET

The already nightmarish condition of Florida’s purge of immigrant voters has attracted a slew of lawsuits. The first of those, filed Friday, comes from two U.S. citizens from Hillsborough County and a Latino civic participation group that claim their voting rights have been violated. The purge has drawn national controversy, sparked a federal civil rights probe, the citizens’ suit, and now suits between Florida and the feds.

The Department of Justice issued Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner a letter indicating the initiation of suit against Florida in federal court, citing the state is in violation of two federal voting rights laws. The suit follows the fed’s inquiry into the voter purge, which has questioned the rights of eligible U.S. citizens to vote.

According to the citizen’s suit, Murat Limage, who was born in Haiti, became a U.S. citizen and subsequently registered to vote in 2010, received a letter in April informing him that he was on a newly compiled list of voters suspected of not being citizens. Limage was told that if he failed to present proof of citizenship within 30 days, his name could be removed from the rolls, making him ineligible to cast his ballot.