Rolling back voting rights.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Comment

Over the last several years, voter I.D. laws passed by state legislatures have been making it harder for poor people, students, the elderly, and minorities to vote.

Attorney General Eric Holder has compared these laws to the poll tax, which was created in the Jim Crow era to deliberately suppress the black vote in the South.

The suspicion that voter I.D. is a cynical effort by Republicans to make it hard for people who tend to vote for Democrats to participate in elections is magnified by the lack of evidence that in-person voter fraud is actually a problem.

Last year, a nationwide study of more than 2,000 cases of alleged election fraud between 2000 and 2012 showed that voter impersonation, which thirty-seven state legislatures had introduced laws to thwart, was "virtually nonexistent," according to The Washington Post.

The investigation, conducted by the Carnegie-Knight Initiative, found only ten cases of alleged in-person voter impersonation over the twelve-year period. That's one in fifteen million. And even those instances were just alleged.

Those facts have not stopped Tea Partiers from sending "election monitors" to guard polling places, looking for suspicious would-be voters in minority neighborhoods all over the United States. And it hasn't stopped Republican legislators from passing laws that require voters to go to arduous lengths to prove they are who they say they are.

Because there is no general right to vote enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, the battle over this most fundamental aspect of citizenship is being fought at the state level.

"Over the past few years, half the states passed laws making it harder to vote," Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center for Justice wrote for The Atlantic in January. "Discrimination was a significant factor: Researchers from the University of Massachusetts found that the states most likely to introduce and pass voting restrictions were those where minority and low-income turnout had increased most since the last presidential election." The repeal of a crucial provision of the Voting Rights Act has made things worse, as Weiser points out.

"Those states previously singled out for special oversight under the Voting Rights Act were among the worst offenders," she noted. "The provision the Supreme Court neutered had been a significant weapon against discriminatory laws: In 2012 alone, it stopped more than fifteen discriminatory voting changes from going into effect, and deterred many more. Now it's...