This week, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker and AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Elizabeth Shuler joined Daily Kos GOTV (Get Out the Vote) Blogathon .
Recent years have seen an assault on the rights of voters across the country, from stringent identification requirements to the throwing away of valid voter registration applications. While most states are seeing only one or two of the variety of assaults on the rights of voters, Florida, as it has in the past, is leading the way in different ways of denying legitimate citizens their right to vote.
Bowing to a huge public outcry, communications conglomerate Clear Channel has agreed to take down more than 100 billboards in predominately African American and Latino neighborhoods in Ohio and Wisconsin designed, say voting rights and civil rights groups, to intimidate voters and suppress the vote.
Also, the company has agreed to post new messages on billboards in those Cleveland, Columbus and Milwaukee neighborhoods encouraging people to exercise their right to vote.
Poll monitors work outside polling locations on Election Day to greet voters, answer questions and report problems. This year, more poll monitors than ever are needed. Restrictive photo ID laws have challenged the right to vote, the cornerstone of democracy. Despite victories in Pennsylvania , where the photo ID law will not be in effect, and the restoration of early voting in Ohio , the battle is not over.
More than 200 union lawyers are prepared to combat any efforts to intimidate voters or suppress the vote and to ensure that everyone’s right to vote is protected between now (early voting is under way in many states) and Election Day.
The members of the AFL-CIO Lawyers Coordinating Committee (LCC)—union lawyers in law firms and union legal departments—are “on the front lines to protect the votes of working families,” said AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker in a telephone press conference today.
Ohio souls will go to the polls on the weekend before Election Day. Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a request by Ohio Republican lawmakers to stay a lower court decision that had refused to allow the state to curtail early voting on the weekend that traditionally yields high voter turnout in communities of color. Many African American churches organize events to get their congregations to the polls after worship services on Sunday.
As a result, early voting will take place in Ohio on the weekend before Election Day.
Earlier this year, as part of a voter suppression campaign in the Buckeye State, Republican legislators passed a bill ending the weekend of early voting.
Actor and SAG-AFTRA member Anne-Marie Johnson grew up at the dawn of the Voting Rights Act and the volatile (and sometimes violent) struggle to ensure the right to vote for all people. She writes in The Huffington Post :
As a woman of color, of a certain age, the threat of losing one's right to cast a vote is not some far off, distant memory in some far off foreign land....In several states across the country, the right of Americans to cast a vote is being challenged.
Communications giant Clear Channel—bought by Mitt Romney’s former firm Bain Capital in 2008—continues to refuse to take down billboards in Ohio and Wisconsin that voting rights experts say have just one purpose: to intimidate and suppress the African American and Latino vote in those two states. Those votes could mean the difference between President Obama winning re-election or Mitt Romney taking the White House.
Sign a petition from Color of Change to Clear Channel demanding that it take down the billboards .
A Pennsylvania state judge this morning issued a partial injunction of the state's voter ID law . Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Simpson ruled that voters will still be asked to present a valid ID, and if they don't have one, they'll be asked to present one next time but will be able to vote in the Nov. 6 election.
Voters will not be required to return within six days to show a valid identification card, as was required by the law passed earlier this year.
We’ll bring you more details later. This ruling only applies to the Nov. 6 election.
" Court Order Confirms Students' Right to Vote in New Hampshire " is a cross-post from the New Hampshire Labor News.
Voting rights groups applauded Strafford Superior Court Judge John Lewis’ order to the Secretary of State to issue new voter registration forms for this election. The new registration forms will delete a paragraph that advised all voters they would be subject to registering a car and getting a state driver's license if they registered to vote. The order also instructs the Secretary of State to post new information on his website and to inform election officials in towns and cities to immediately begin using the corrected voter registration form. This decision is based upon the recognition that individuals who are in the state for a limited period of time, such as students or persons doing military duty, have an absolute right to vote here while living in New Hampshire, but are unable to get state driver's licenses because the motor vehicle law limits residents to those who intend to stay permanently or indefinitely.
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