While advocates of voter identification laws say the goal is to prevent fraud at the polls, Rep. Elijah Cummings insists that what is really at work is voter suppression during a campaign that promises to be a tighter than ever race for the presidency.

“As many as one in four African-American voters, more than one in six Hispanic voters, and about one in ten eligible voters overall do not possess a current and valid government-issued photo ID,” wrote Cummings in a press release Sept. 18, citing a NYU School of Law Brennan Center for Justice analysis of a voter rights bill he co-introduced with 13 House of Representatives members.

The bill, introduced as the America Votes Act of 2012 by Cummings and Rep. Rick Larsen (D-Wash.), targets the drive spearheaded by Republican opponents of President Obama to require voters to produce government issued identification at the time votes are cast.

Read more at The Afro.

Deidra Reese isn't waiting for people to come to her to find out whether they are registered to vote.

With iPad in hand, Reese is going to community centers, homes and churches in nine Ohio cities, looking up registrations to make sure voters have proper ID and everything else they need to cast ballots on Election Day.

"We are not going to give back one single inch. We have fought too long and too hard," said Reese, 45, coordinator of the Columbus-based Ohio Unity Coalition, an affiliate of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation.

Reese is part of a cadre of black women engaged in a revived wave of voting rights advocacy four years after the historic election of the nation's first black president. Provoked by voting law changes in various states, they have decided to help voters navigate the system — a fitting role, they say, given that black women had the highest turnout of any group of voters in 2008.

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African-American women, who number about 20 million in the U.S., have long been the largest group of Democratic voters in the country, said David Bositis, senior research associate with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

Read more at ABC News.

The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and its President and CEO, Ralph B. Everett, Esq., will hold a presidential debate watch at the Joint Center offices on Wednesday, October 3, 2012 at 8 PM. Join us for an evening of enlightening political discussion and a viewing of President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney’s debate on domestic policy.

Read more at Politic365.

The voting booth is the one place where we all are presumed equal, yet the reality this year is that the playing field is far from level.   This core American value is threatened this year by some politicians who have manipulated laws for their own gain by passing restrictions that could make it harder for millions of Americans to vote.  Numerous independent, non-partisan studies indicate that those most affected by the new rules are minorities, young people, seniors and low-income people.
 
As National Voter Registration Day approaches on September 25, a broad coalition of civil rights, faith-based and social justice organizations, and groups representing communities of color will host a press conference call to discuss the “state of emergency” in voting, the particular challenges facing their communities, and the steps and resources all can use to ensure that they are able to exercise their right and civic duty to vote.   

Download the entire press release below.

Enveloped by red, white, and blue, thousands of black and brown faces will stand out this week at the Democratic National Convention, mirroring an increasingly diverse America and contrasting with scenes from the Republican convention that just ended.

Led by a president with a black father and a white mother, Democrats will tout diversity and sell themselves as inclusionary, sensitive to the most marginalized, and hip to the nation's changing demographics. Of their delegates, one study found, 26 percent are black.

The same study found that 2.1 percent of this year's GOP delegates are black. Republican activists see themselves as defenders of hard work and merit without regard to creed or color - their presidential nominee, after all, is a Mormon - and they recoil at Democrats' use of an affirmative-action system to pick some delegates based on race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation.

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"Having a party system based on race is not that different from the party systems in the Middle East based on religion," said analyst David A. Bositis, who compiled racial data on the delegates for the nonpartisan Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington.

A "chasm" now exists between Republicans and African Americans, Bositis said. Part of it is a response to the rise of the tea party, he said, which is perceived as hostile to blacks. He said only two of the 165 national GOP committee people are black.

Although Obama helped bring additional blacks into the Democratic column, Bositis said a bigger draw is some of the party's policies. He said that Obama's health-care reform law, for example, helps minorities more than whites because they are more likely to be uninsured.

Read more at Philly.com.

The Joint Center for Political and Economic studies today released its quadrennial report, Blacks and the 2012 Democratic National Convention, which tracks both African American participation at the event and, more broadly, the relationship between African Americans and the Democratic Party.

The Convention Guide provides a comprehensive look at African Americans, their voting patterns and preferences and their relationship as voting citizens to the Democratic Party. It contains historical data about black voting patterns in recent decades and focuses on states where the black vote has the potential to affect the outcome of the presidential election as well as U.S. Senate contests.

Download the full press release below.

While the 2008 Democratic National Convention represented an historic occasion for African Americans and black politics when, for the first time, an African American was the Democratic Party’s nominee for President, 2012 represents a somewhat different but still momentous historic occasion--a black President, Barack Obama, seeking re-election.

The presidential election on November 6, 2012, is likely to be quite different from the Obama-McCain election in 2008.  The political climate in 2012 is greatly changed from four years earlier--the Republicans regained control of the U.S. House in 2010, there is substantial national dissatisfaction with the economy and the general direction of the country.  In 2008, demographic and political changes, along with the Obama campaign’s grassroots and internet organizing, changed the electoral map with Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, several states in the American West, and Florida, North Carolina and Virginia in the South moving from red to blue.

This guide details the range of participation by African Americans in the Democratic Party, the geographical and partisan dimensions of the black vote in recent years, and black voters’ attitudes toward many issues that may be significant in the fall campaign. The information will be of interest to political activists and election watchers, as well as to scholars of American politics. Moreover, by better appreciating their own capacity to be influential, black Democrats will be better able to use their influence in pursuit of their public policy interests.

One way to think about this year's election is as a contest between the impact of a sour economy (advantage Romney) and the power of the nation's shifting demographics (advantage Obama).

Put simply, the groups that support President Barack Obama most strongly — blacks, Hispanics, young people, unmarried women — have been growing as a share of the electorate. Those who support Mitt Romney the most — white working men and older people — have not.

This demographic tide is so strong that some Democrats came away from their 2008 victory feeling that a political reordering was in the works that could be as important as the New Deal realignment that ushered in a generation of Democratic strength after the Great Depression.

The Great Recession put a deep dent in that hope of theirs, as it soured most other optimism around America.

But now both Republicans and Democrats see that the demographic tide is still running. But it is running into the effects of the bad economy.

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The Republican Party says delegates aren't asked to identify their race, so they don't know how many are black. The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, which has been counting just that since 1974, said Thursday there are at least 47 black delegates, or about 2.1 percent.

Read more at Google News.

The Joint Center for Political and Economic studies has released its quadrennial report, Blacks and the 2012 Republican National Convention, showing there are at least 47 African Americans among this year’s GOP convention delegates, or 2.1 percent of the total in Tampa.

The Joint Center’s Convention Guide provides a comprehensive look at African Americans, their voting patterns and preferences and their relationship as voting citizens to the Republican Party. It contains historical data about black voting patterns in recent decades and focuses on states where the black vote has the potential to affect the outcome of the presidential election as well as several Senate contests.

Read more by downloading the full press release below.

The 2008 Presidential election was an historic occasion for African Americans, when for the first time, an African American was elected President.  This year, President Obama is seeking a second term, and there is no reason to expect any change in black voting patterns.  President Obama will almost certainly receive strong black support on November 6.  The Republicans’ nominee, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has little history with African Americans.  Further, the growing influence of the anti-black Tea Party within the GOP makes political appeals to African Americans difficult for any Republican office-seeker.  Finally, Romney’s Mormon faith is off-putting to many African Americans since for much of their history, Mormons held blacks to be inferior to whites.  The divide between African Americans and the Republican Party, once so narrow, has become a chasm.

This guide details the range of participation by African Americans in the Republican Party, the geographical and partisan dimensions of the black vote in recent years, and black voters’ attitudes toward many issues that may be significant in the fall campaign. The information will be of interest to political activists and election watchers, as well as to scholars of American politics. Moreover, by better appreciating their own capacity to be influential, black Republicans, despite their low numbers among the voting population, will nonetheless be better able to use what influence they have in pursuit of their public policy interests.