Tuesday, September 27, 2016
Voting RIghts Today
The League of Women Voters argues that voter ID laws disproportionately impact women. See here for an article about that topic and here for a piece from NPR. In addition, voter identification laws can create barriers to voting to people whose gender identity does not match their government-issued IDs. Take a look at this report from the Williams Institute and these materials from the National Center for Transgender Equality.
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I thought the article about voting ID laws particularly hurting women was interesting. I hadn't really thought of it from the perspective of a married woman who changes her name, but not all of her documents. We tend to focus on voting rights for racial minorities, immigrants, and felons. Then, reading the Williams report about transgender ID challenges, the point really comes home. Society makes it hard for anyone who wants to change their birth information to vote-- something that straight, cis, white men never really have to consider. It makes me wonder, when large groups of European immigrant men came to the US, how did they get their voting rights? I suspect many did not have a birth certificate... Were the rules more relaxed back then, or did they face similar discrimination until their natural born sons could produce real birth certificates?
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