WCMessenger.com: Don t restrict the right to vote

WCMessenger.com Opinion: Columns

Don t restrict the right to vote

By Raul Salazar | Published Thursday, April 26, 2007

The League of Women Voters of Texas, a nonpartisan organization made up of 32 local leagues across Texas, supports full voting participation by all eligible Texans and opposes any legislation that creates new barriers to casting your vote in Texas.

Since the 2000 presidential election, a great deal of attention has focused on our nation s systems of election administration.

Many Americans are deeply concerned that their votes may not be properly counted and that eligible citizens may be blocked from registering to vote and from voting.

From voting machines to voter registration, from voter roll purging practices to provisional balloting, Americans are worried about the conduct of elections. The League also has concerns about our election systems.

From our perspective, any proposal that restricts voter registration or raises barriers to voting in order to deal with the supposed problem of non-citizen voting is a fear-based approach instead of a fact-based solution. We simply have not seen the facts that would justify restricting the franchise.

Many nonprofit groups, including the League of Women Voters, hold voter registration drives to help people register to vote at the grocery store, the church and other places where people ordinarily gather. These drives have been critical to increased voter registration.

House Bill 626 will kill these efforts as most people don t carry their passport or birth certificate with them to everyday places. Texas can t afford a lower voter turnout.

Advocates expressed deep concern over new data that suggests Latinos, Asian Americans, and African Americans are less likely to vote as a result of increasingly restrictive voter identification (ID) requirements.

These findings are the result of preliminary research presented to the United States election Assistance Commission (EAC) by the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University.

Researchers found that in the 2004 elections, all voters in states requiring voters to present documentation establishing their identity at the polls, were 2.7 percent less likely to vote than voters in states where no documentation was required. Latinos were 10 percent less likely to vote, Asian-Americans 8.5 percent less likely to vote and African Americans 5.7 percent less likely to vote. HB218, which would require more documents to establish identity at the polls, will also decrease voting by minority voters in Texas.

Voting is the most fundamental expression of citizenship. Breaking down barriers to citizen voter participation from literacy tests to the poll tax has been a constant battle for those of us who believe that every citizen should be able to exercise their right to vote.

We support full voting participation by all eligible American citizens and would hope that this Legislature would join us in seeking ways to improve voter participation rather than restrict it.

Raul Salazar is executive administrator for the League of Women Voters of Texas, 1212 Guadalupe St., Suite 107, in Austin. He can be reached at (512) 472-1100.