New State Rules Raising Hurdles at Voting Booth

MICHAEL COOPER

The New York Times

October 3, 2011 ET

Since Re­publicans won con­trol of many state­houses last November, more than a dozen states have passed laws requiring vot­ers to show photo identification at polls, cutting back early voting pe­riods or impos­ing new re­strictions on vot­er reg­istration drives.
With a pres­idential campaign swing­ing into high gear, the question be­ing asked is how much of an impact all of these new laws will have on the 2012 race.
State of­ficials, po­lit­ical parties and voting experts have all said that the impact could be sizable. Now, a new study to be re­leased Monday by the Brennan Center for Jus­tice at New York Uni­versity School of Law has tried to       

tally just how many vot­ers stand to be af­fected.

The center, which has stud­ied the new laws and opposed some of them in court and oth­er venues, an­alyzed 19 laws that passed and 2 exec­utive or­ders that were issued in 14 states this year, and concluded that they “could make it signif­icantly hard­er for more than five million el­i­gible vot­ers to cast ballots in 2012.”
Re­publicans, who have passed almost all of the new election laws, say they are nec­essary to pre­vent vot­er fraud, and question why photo identification should be rou­tinely required at airports but not at polling sites. Democrats counter that the new laws are a solution in search of a prob­lem, since vot­er fraud is rare. They worry that the laws will discour­age, or even block, el­i­gible vot­ers — especially poor vot­ers, young vot­ers and African-American               

vot­ers, who tend to vote for Democrats.

The Jus­tice De­part­ment must review the new laws in sev­eral states to make sure that they do not run afoul of the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s vot­er identification law in 2008, saying that while 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.
“This year there’s been a signif­icant wave of new laws in states across the country that have the ef­fect of cracking down on voting rights,” said Michael Waldman, the exec­utive di­rector of the Brennan Center, who noted that five million votes would have made a differ­ence in both the 2000 and 2004 pres­idential elections. “It is the most signif­icant rollback in voting             

rights in decades.”

Just how much of an impact the new laws will have is a mat­ter of some dis­pute. Sen­ator Richard J. Durbin, Demo­crat of Illinois, who held a hearing on the new laws last month, said they “will make it hard­er for millions of disabled, young, minor­ity, rural, el­derly, home­less and low-income Americans to vote.” Re­publicans note that states like Georgia and