Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: i repubblicani tolgono il diritto di voti agli elettori neri per  battere i democratici

‘Jim Crawford’ Republicans
The GOP is working to keep eligible African-Americans from voting in
several states.
It was a mainstay of Jim Crow segregation: for 100 years after the
Civil War, Southern white Democrats kept eligible blacks from voting
with poll taxes, literacy tests and property requirements. Starting in
the 1960s, the U.S. Supreme Court declared these assaults on the heart
of American democracy unconstitutional.
Now, with the help of a 2008 Supreme Court decision, Crawford vs.
Marion County (Indiana) Election Board, white Republicans in some
areas will keep eligible blacks from voting by requiring driver's
licenses. Not only is this new-fangled discrimination constitutional,
it's spreading.
GOP proponents of the move say they are merely trying to reduce voter
fraud. But while occasional efforts to stuff ballot boxes through
phony absentee voting still surface, the incidence of individual vote
fraud—voting when you aren't eligible—is virtually non-existent, as
"The Truth About Vote Fraud," a study by the Brennan Center for
Justice at New York University, clearly shows. In other words, the
problem Republicans claim they want to combat with increased ID
requirements doesn't exist. Meanwhile, those ID hurdles facing
individuals do nothing to stop the organized insiders who still try to
game the system.
The motive here is political, not racial. Republicans aren't bigots
like the Jim Crow segregationists. But they know that increased
turnout in poor, black neighborhoods is good for Democrats. In that
sense, the effort to suppress voting still amounts to the practical
equivalent of racism.
In Crawford, the court upheld an Indiana law essentially requiring a
passport or driver's license in order to vote. But more than two
thirds of Indiana adults have no passports and nearly 15 percent have
no driver's licenses. These eligible voters, disproportionately
African-American, will need to take a bus or catch a ride from a
friend down to the motor vehicles bureau to make sure they obtain a
nondriver photo ID. Otherwise, they cannot vote in Indiana this year.
To get an idea of how many African-Americans nationwide lack driver's
licenses, recall Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when thousands were
stranded without transportation. "Crawford Republicans" could make the
old "Jim Crow Democrats" look like pikers when it comes to voter
suppression.
Consider Wisconsin, a swing state. Republicans officials there are
suing to enforce a "no match, no vote" provision in state regulations,
where voters must not only show a photo ID, but establish that it
matches the name and number in the Department of Motor Vehicles or
Social Security Administration database. (Democrats are resisting the
suit.) These lists are riddled with errors in every state, as the
Brennan Center has proven in its report, "Restoring the Right to
Vote."
How error prone? Florida wrongly purged tens of thousands of law-
abiding, mostly Democratic, voters from the rolls in 2000, claiming
they were felons. (This, among other things, cost Al Gore the
presidency). Even after the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) and worldwide
attention, the Florida software is still flawed. It requires only an
80 percent match to the name of a convicted felon. "So if there's a
murderous John Peterson, the software disenfranchises everyone named
John Peters," Andrew Hacker writes in a recent New York Review of
Books.
Voters caught in these snafus can have their rights restored but not
if they fail to straighten things out before Election Day. Otherwise
they are granted "provisional ballots" that are sometimes counted and
sometimes not. Even obtaining a provisional ballot can require an
appearance in front of a judge in some states. Faced with the hassle,
most voters just give up.
The ability of actual felons to get their right to vote back varies by
state. It's especially hard for felons to vote in Virginia; a bit
easier in Pennsylvania and Michigan. (Other countries are far more
generous to ex-convicts, figuring that having paid their debt to
society they should be allowed to vote again.)
All of this would seem to favor John McCain over Barack Obama this
year, but some voting-rights trends are pointing in the opposite
direction.
In Ohio, where the governor and secretary of state changed in 2006
from Republican to Democrat, a new law allows voters to register to
vote and fill out an absentee ballot at the same time between Sept. 30
and Oct. 6. This will mean a week of furious campaigning and early
voting in a key state.
Advantage Obama. With 470,000 students enrolled in Ohio's public
colleges and universities (and nine out of 10 are Ohio residents),
expect a bumper crop of young voters.
The combination of voter suppression and early voting make turnout
predictions perilous. And without knowing turnout, most polling is
deeply flawed.
So about the only thing we know for sure this year is that with the
Crawford decision we are seeing a return to the days when one
political party saw a huge advantage in preventing as many poor people
as possible from voting. That's understandable politically, but also
un-American.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/158392/output/print

 several states.
i repubblicani vogliono una vittoria alla antonio pinter eh?