Study: Young Latino Voting Rights Threatened
By Hector Luis Alamo, Jr., Being Latino
My fellow young Latinos, your voting rights are under attack.
From Fox News Latino:
“Young minority voter turnout could drop by almost 700,000 in states with photo ID laws, says a new study.
The lower turnout among voters under the age of 30 could affect several House races as well as the tight presidential contest.
Using calculations based on turnout figures for the past two presidential elections, researchers at the University of Chicago and Washington University in St. Louis concluded that overall turnout this year by young people of color ages 18-29 could fall by somewhere between 538,000 to 696,000 in states with photo ID laws.
‘Our estimates are conservative. We are looking at demobilization from 9 to 25 percent,’ said Cathy Cohen, a University of Chicago expert on young and minority voters, who worked on the study with Jon Rogowski of Washington University. ‘If young people really have valid IDs at a rate of only 25 or even 50 percent, the number of young people of color disenfranchised will be even greater than what we estimate.’ “
The assault is in full force in 17 states: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin.
Most young people have ID, researchers, but the ID they have may not be valid when the time comes to vote.
“Young minority voters, Cohen and Rogowski said, tend to be poorer and more transient, which means they are less likely to have a current address on their driver’s licenses or other ID. Their licenses may be suspended or revoked due to unpaid fines, or they may not have access to the documents they need in order to get valid identification. Even if young voters are able to pull the necessary documentation together, the extra steps they must take to get an acceptable ID might prove discouraging, Cohen said.”
According to the researchers, the recent outcrop of voter ID requirements could potentially turn away “68,000 to 250,000 young Hispanic voters” and “170,000 to 475,000 young black voters.”
“Those numbers amount to a potential erosion of the gains in young minority voter participation over the two previous presidential election cycles, the analysis said.
In 2004, turnout for minority voters ages 18-24 was 44 percent for blacks, 20.4 percent for Hispanics, and 23.4 percent for Asian-Americans. In 2008, 52.3 percent of young blacks, 27.4 percent of young Latinos and 27.8 percent of young Asian-Americans turned out to vote.”
As conservative journalist David Frum astutely pointed out on Monday, voter purges rarely catch ineligible voters on the rolls, and when they do, the person is rarely Latino.
The evidence shows quite clearly that the GOP is going to great lengths to keep young and minority voters from the polls this year through a degree of voter suppression unseen since Jim Crow. Apparently, the party’s strategy is to appeal to its older, white male base, while keeping blacks, Latinos and youths — you know, everyone else who would rather remove their kneecaps than pull the Republican lever — away from the ballot box on Election Day.
This article was first published in Being Latino.
Hector Luis Alamo, Jr., is an associate editor at Being Latino and a native son of Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood. He received a B.A. in history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where his concentration was on ethnic relations in the United States. While at UIC, he worked first as a staff writer for the Chicago Flame and later became the newspaper’s opinions editor. Since then he has contributed to various Chicago-area publications, most notably, Hispanically Speaking News and Gozamos. He has maintained a personal blog since 2007, YoungObservers.blogspot.com, where he discusses topics ranging from political history and philosophy to culture and music.
