With the focus of my upcoming policy brief being the issue of voter disenfranchisement in America, I have recently been doing a lot of research into how unfair state elections laws are used to exclude certain groups from participating in government.
Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states:
"The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures."
The human right described above is violated in areas where individuals are required to have their IDs match their voter file exactly (which may disenfranchise recently married or divorced women) and areas where bilingual ballots are not provided (which in some communities disenfranchises minority voters) as well as in just about any area where an individual's ID is required to begin with or where it takes hours of waiting in line to cast a vote or where an individual would have to sit through a caucus for several hours (and in the case of a caucus vote, does not have the option of an absentee ballot).
In 2012, my husband was part of a federal lawsuit against the Dutchess County Board of Elections when the Republican Elections Commissioner tried to have more than 100 college student's voter registration forms thrown out. A federal judge ordered that in this case, these students be registered however our community is not the only place where young people are having to fight just to have the right to vote. This case is being used as case law to further codify the fight for students to register to vote using their dorm address.
In 2013, our Supreme Court brought us back several decades by overturning a large and significant aspect of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was instituted to limit the opportunity for policies that disenfranchise voters, such as those described above.
As you can see, no matter how much progress we seem to be making, there are still so many areas in which the right's of the individual come second to the political motivations of policy makers.
http://www.dailyfreeman.com/general-news/20121106/dutchess-county-board-of-elections-ordered-to-register-college-students
http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/
http://www.marinij.com/marinnews/ci_26476715/marin-voice-after-nearly-50-years-jim-crow
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/us/supreme-court-ruling.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
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