Editorials: Will you have the right to vote in 2016? | Ari Berman/Los Angeles Times

As Iowa voters headed to their caucus sites Monday, 94-year-old Rosanell Eaton sat in the first row of a federal courtroom in Winston-Salem, N.C., to witness the closing arguments of a trial challenging North Carolina’s new voter identification law. Eaton, who is African American and grew up in the Jim Crow South, had to recite the preamble to the Constitution from memory to register to vote. She had been participating in elections for 70 years when North Carolina passed its strict voter ID law in 2013. Lawyers for the North Carolina NAACP played a videotaped deposition during the trial of Eaton recounting how the names on her driver’s license and voter registration card did not match. To get her paperwork in order, Eaton had to make 11 trips to different state agencies in 2015, totaling more than 200 miles and 20 hours. “I’m disgusted,” Eaton told the Raleigh News & Observer as she left the courtroom. North Carolina is one of 16 states that have new voting restrictions in place since the last presidential contest, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, accounting for 178 electoral votes, including in crucial swing states such as Ohio, Wisconsin and Virginia.
The voting changes include requiring government-issued photo ID to cast a ballot, cutting early voting, eliminating election-day voter registration and demanding proof of citizenship to register. For voters like Eaton, how and if they’ll be able to cast a ballot will be as big of a question as who they’ll vote for this year.
The nationwide push to make it harder to vote began in earnest after the 2010 election, when Republicans gained control of an unprecedented number of states. Their goal was to make the electorate older, whiter and more conservative compared with the younger and more diverse electorate that turned out in record numbers for Barack Obama in 2008.
Although the connection isn’t obvious to everyone, these voting restrictions disproportionately affect the core of Obama’s political coalition, including young people (some states exclude student IDs from the list of acceptable documents) and minority voters (who are more likely to vote early and less likely than whites to have state-issued IDs). A new study by political scientists at UC San Diego found that “a strict ID law could be expected to depress Latino turnout by 9.3 points, Black turnout by 8.6 points, and Asian American turnout by 12.5 points.”
Full Article: Will you have the right to vote in 2016? – LA Times.