Discouraging citizens from voting

Los Angeles Times

Every election season, we’re told that people who fail to vote are “lazy, apathetic, and morally culpable,” said Noah Berlatsky. But the real reason we have so many citizens who don’t vote is that we have policies deliberately designed to discourage people from heading to the polls. From the beginning of the republic, when only white, male property owners could cast ballots, our country has disenfranchised large groups of people. Women didn’t gain the right to vote until 1920. Black men and women didn’t have their voting rights guaranteed until 1965. Today, many states refuse to let citizens with past felony convictions vote, which effectively disenfranchises millions of African-Americans, while others adopt voter ID laws requiring driver’s licenses or other photo IDs that blacks, Hispanics, the poor, and the young often lack. Many countries hold elections on weekends to make it easy to vote, but our Election Day is on Tuesday, when many low-paid workers are not given time off to vote. Thanks to all these obstacles, the U.S. ranks 31st among 34 developed nations in voter turnout. Rather than blaming nonvoters, “that’s what we should be angry about—and what we need to change.”