In the days before Tuesday’s election, two organizations released reports filled with dire warnings about the potential impact of voter ID and other laws, ostensibly aimed at preventing voter fraud, but which voter rights advocates believe were really intended to reduce minority participation at the polls.
A Center for Social Inclusion report entitled “Citizens Denied: The Impact of Photo ID Laws on Senior Citizens of Color” warned that nearly half of black voters over age 65 and one in three Latino senior voters would have a more difficult time registering and voting on Election Day due to photo ID laws passed in some 33 states.
The reason: historical factors like Jim Crow exclusion made it less likely that these voters would currently possess a state-issued ID, or in some cases, a copy of their birth certificate. The study pointed to the potential disenfranchisement of some 140,000 black and Latino seniors nationwide.
A second report by the group IMPACT warned of reduced voting access and opportunity for African-Americans in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida, where restrictive ID laws, and in the case of Florida, the halving of the early voting period by the Republican-controlled legislature and governor presented potential hurdles for up to 367,000 black voters in Florida, and 115,000 in Pennsylvania.
“In Florida, African-American voter growth rates rose at almost twice the rate of their White counterparts between the 2000 and the 2004 presidential election, i.e. 34 percent to 19 percent, compared to 2004 to 2008, which was twenty times that of their white counterparts, i.e. 21 percent to 1 percent, respectively,” a press release from IMPACT stated. “Most importantly, there is no clear method to determine the large potential impact on states’ introduction and enactment of voter ID laws. Therefore, IMPACT recommends that states continue to make voting easy, fair, and accessible.”
And while the potentially disenfranchising effect of voter ID laws remains problematic (in Ohio, potentially thousands of voters were actually turned away, or forced to vote on less-often counted provisional ballots, as a result of a voter purge that swept up eligible voters in the state), the actual reduction of black voter participation in 2012 never materialized.
Exit polls show the minority share of the electorate increased to 28 percent in 2012, versus 26 percent in 2008 — one of the underlying assumptions the Obama campaign took into the election, but which polls, notably Gallup, missed. And overall African-American participation remained steady at 13 percent of the electorate, compared to 2008. And accelerated black and Hispanic turnout delivered the margin of victory to President Obama.
Florida’s reduced early voting period actually galvanized black churches, who took full advantage of the one remaining Sunday to conduct a two-day “souls to the polls” marathon. And even as Election Day turned into a late Election Night, and with the race in Ohio, and thus for the 270 votes needed to win the presidency, called by 11 p.m., black voters remained in line in Miami-Dade and Broward, two heavily Democratic counties in Florida, where black voters broke turnout records even compared to 2008.
In Ohio, where Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted seemed to work feverishly to halt or sharply reduce early voting, which is primarily utilized by Democrats, and African-Americans in particular, and where Husted actually altered the provisional ballot affirmation form in a way that put the burden of noting the form of ID used on the voter, rather than the poll worker as Ohio law requires, African-Americans responded with record early voting turnout.
At the polls, individual voters said they worried that they had been part of the “voter purge” that Husted implemented, which knocked more than 30,000 off the rolls, many incorrectly. And State Sen. Nina Turner often likened Husted’s many attempts to curtail early voting to Jim Crow restrictions on black voters in decades past.
It seems that many black voters across the country agreed.
“Republicans thought that they could suppress the vote, but these efforts actually motivated people to get registered and cast a ballot,” Ohio State Sen. Nina Turner said. “It’s no surprise that the communities targeted by these policies came out to the polls in a big way—they saw this not just as an affront to their rights, but as a call to action.”
“From the tours we did in 22 states, it became clear to us that many blacks that were apathetic and indifferent became outraged and energized when they realized that [Republicans] were changing the rules in the middle of the game, in terms of voter ID laws, ending ‘souls to the polls,’” said Rev. Al Sharpton, president of the National Action Network, who also hosts MSNBC’s Politics Nation. “So what was just another election, even though it dealt with the re-election of the first black president, took on a new dimension when they realized that they were implementing the disenfranchisement of black voters.”
Sharpton and NAN held “souls to the polls” rallies across Florida the weekend before Election Day, in a push dubbed “Operation Lemonade” because pastors and voters sought to turn the “lemons” Republicans created by cutting Florida’s early voting period down to six days, into “lemonade” by getting out the vote.
“I’m very happy that South Florida voters staved off the voter suppression from Gov Rick Scott and the Republican led House and Senate,” said Bishop Victor T. Curry, pastor of Miami’s New Birth Baptist church, and that city’s NAN chapter president, who led the “Operation Lemonade” effort in Miami-Dade county. “Democracy WON!”
“We did a rally in Eatonville,” Sharpton said. “And I had a guy come up to me and call voter ID a poll tax. He said to me, ‘I’m 85 years old, I don’t drive so I don’t have an ID and don’t need one. It costs me money to get one, and its 27 miles from my house so I have to get someone to drive me there.’ When I started putting people like this on the air (on his daily talk radio show) and bringing them up on stage at rallies, we saw the energy increase immediately as a result.”
The same could be said of Ohio, and in both states, the substantial early vote among African-Americans appears to have been decisive for Obama.
“If they had left it alone, I think they would not have seen the long lines at the polls,” Sharpton said. “I think what they did gave us the spark that we needed in this election.”
Follow Joy Reid on Twitter at @thereidreport.