Ken
O’Brien
Last night Rachel Madow reported on a major break
from a national trend. For more than a decade, voting rights advocates have on
been on the defensive. They’ve resisted one effort after another to restrict
access to the polls, efforts that got new life following the Florida election
fiasco of 2000, when a large black turnout almost (or maybe did) put Al Gore
over the top in the Sunshine State, and that reached full force following
Barack Obama’s election in 2008. Between the 2010 and 2012 elections alone, governors signed into law 23 bills that imposed constraints on voting, including requiring photo ID at the polls and curtailing same-day registration and early voting. While there have been defensive victories here and there, the resistance has been futile in many states and not helped by the Supreme Court, which in 2008 ruled in favor of voter ID laws and in 2013gutted key elements of the Voting Rights Act.
