By Lee A. Daniels

We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro
in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York
believes he has nothing for which to vote.

                                                                 Martin Luther King, Jr.
“I Have a Dream Speech”
Lincoln Memorial
Washington, D.C.
August 28, 1963

Looking at it in historical terms, one could say from that moment forward – the moment of the Civil Rights Movement’s triumph and the passage of the Voting Rights Act  in the mid-1960s – black Americans set about proving they knew they had something to vote for.

And they were soon joined by other Americans of color.

In 2008 Barack Obama won the presidency because, in significant measure, African Americans, Latino Americans and Asian Americans made good on the fundamental rite of democracy: they voted, and in record numbers

Not only did Candidate Obama win 95 percent of the black vote, he also garnered two-thirds of the votes Latino voters cast and more than half of those cast by Asian Americans. Even more important, all three groups markedly increased the number of eligible voters among them who actually voted.

Since then, a coalition of conservative organizations and state legislators – looking ahead to the national elections of this year and the next eight – has been trying to ensure that that good deed does not go unpunished.

Their response has been to enact state laws (and propose still more) which, according to a recent report by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) “are rooted in the worst traditions of America’s contested history of democracy” and “threaten to substantially undermine the political strength already harnessed by minority communities during the 2008 Presidential Election.”

Generally speaking, the various measures tighten the requirements to register to vote, reduce the pool of eligible voters by banning more people with felony convictions from voting at all, sharply reduce the opportunity for voters to vote early or by absentee ballot; and require voters to have government-issued photo identification in order to vote. All of these measures, while ostensibly applicable to the general population, disproportionately affect African Americans and Latino Americans: For example, about 25 percent of blacks and 16 percent of Latinos – or 6 million and 3 million voters, respectively – don’t have government-issued photo identification papers. By comparison, about 8 percent of whites don’t have such ID.

The conservatives’ pursuit has also given fresh impetus to “several states and activists” suing to strip what the LDF report characterizes as “core protections” of access to the ballot out of the Voting Rights Act, which “has done more to ensure the right to vote for people of color than any other.”

The report, “Defending Democracy: Confronting Modern Barriers to Voting Rights in America,” (PDF) declares that the ideas behind these laws, which have spread like a virus through more than three dozen state legislatures, represent a noxious reaction to the expansion of democracy the civil rights victories produced.

According to the report, 14 states have enacted some twenty-five measures “that will unfairly and unnecessarily restrict the right to vote and exact a disproportionate price on African-Americans and other voters of color.

“Dozens more restrictions have been proposed nationwide,” the report continues, “in a coordinated assault on voting rights.”

There is an unmistakable partisan cast to these efforts. Conservative organizations and Republican state legislators are pushing them; according to the report their invidious impact will fall overwhelmingly on core Democratic constituencies and Democratic-leaning voters: “communities of color, the poor, the elderly, the disabled, and the young.”

The laws’ proponents claim that the new measures are simply intended to deter voting fraud, but provide no evidence that voter fraud, either deliberate or accidental, has been a problem of any significance in recent memory. Ironically, the only instance of deliberate voter fraud to draw significant national attention recently has been the conviction on that charge and five other felony charges earlier this month of Charlie White, the Republican Secretary of State of Indiana, its top elections official. A jury found him guilty of having lied about his actual address when he was serving on a local town council that was his steppingstone to the higher office.

Indeed, the LDF document contends that the true spur to the “assault” stems from two societal developments. The first is the high level of mobilization of core Democratic and Democratic-leaning voting blocs have shown over the last six years and particularly in the national elections of 2008 and 2010. The second is the substantial population growth of African Americans, Latino Americans and Asian Americans – at rates of from 12 to 43 percent – over the last decade, while white population growth was less than two percent. Smaller populations of Americans of color – American Indians and Alaskan Natives, and Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders – who also tend to vote heavily Democratic have also experienced significant growth rates.

The potential impact of this combination on the fortunes of the two parties and the conservative and liberal political agendas, the report states, has made some turn away from encouraging greater participation in the political process and support “an assault on voting rights that is historic, both in its scope and its intensity.”

In response, the report urges citizens, particularly those in communities of color to learn about restrictive measures that have been enacted or proposed in their states, and how to overcome them; and aid communal efforts to increase the pool of registered voters and help get people to the polls on election day

The Obama administration has also entered the fray over these laws. The U.S. Department of Justice has blocked a new South Carolina voter-identification law that voting rights advocates charged would likely prevent tens of thousands of the state’s present voters from voting; and U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder last month declared that the department would do all it could to defend Americans’ right to vote, calling it “a moral imperative.”

In other words, the already-fierce battle over the franchise between those forces who want to limit the right to vote and those who want to maintain its expansive momentum is bound to intensify enormously as this year’s battle for the Presidency moves into high gear. As Alexander Keyssar, an authority on voting at Harvard, wrote earlier this month, “The 2012 election campaign is likely to be a fight for every last vote, which means that it will also be a fight over who gets to cast one.”

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.com