News
NAACP will challenge voter ID laws nationwide
Supporters of the laws say that they are necessary to eliminate voter fraud, no matter how rare it is. And some argue that without ID checks at the polls, there’s no way to track how many people may be casting illegal votes.
“I’m not sure how much fraud they think is acceptable,” said Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank. “The U.S. has a long history of voter fraud, and it could make the difference in a close election.”
The NAACP announcement came on a day that voters in Mississippi approved a proposed constitutional amendment to require that voters present government-issued identification at the polls. Voters in Maine repealed a law requiring them to enroll at least two days before an election, restoring a four-decade policy of allowing registrations as late as Election Day.
Last week, Democrats in the U.S. House asked secretaries of state in all 50 states to oppose voter identification laws.
The United Federation of Teachers, the health care workers’ union 1199SEIU, National Council of La Raza and the Asian-American Legal Defense Fund were among the groups represented at Tuesday’s news conference. George Gresham, the president of 1199SEIU, said that his organization would bus 10,000 of its members from around the state and the mid-Atlantic region to participate in the Dec. 10 protests.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.
