No excuses, people: Vote while you can

Say what you will about Maryland, but be thankful this is not North Carolina or Texas or the state of my birth, Georgia. Here voting is generally encouraged. In other places, officials are outdoing themselves creating ways to keep people — especially those likely to vote for Democrats — as far away from ballots as possible.

Complaints are being lodged about ridiculous voter ID laws that in North Dakota have left more than 80,000 voters disenfranchised — many of them Native Americans — and about closed, relocated, hard-to-get-to or just plain inadequate polls in numerous states. “We should not in 2018 be revisiting 1960 tactics to prevent young people, African-Americans and other people from simply casting a vote,” Derrick Johnson, head of the NAACP, says.

At its worst, blacks seeking to exercise a vote first guaranteed black men in 1870 and all women in 1920, had to do things like recite from memory passages from the U.S. Constitution or guess the number of jelly beans in a jar or the number of bubbles in a bar of soap. That’s why the 1965 Voting Rights Act was necessary. The law came about only because of bloodshed and lives sacrificed during protests, marches and boycotts in the deep South that began in earnest after World War II when returning soldiers refused to go along with the old order.

Most of us have it easy in Maryland. Online registration. Early voting. Onsite registration during early voting. And, since 2016, ex-felons can take part in the electoral process.