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.

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.

From the convention stage here, the Republican Party has tried to highlight its diversity, giving prime speaking slots to Latinos and blacks who have emphasized their party’s economic appeal to all Americans.

But they have delivered those speeches to a convention hall filled overwhelmingly with white faces, an awkward contrast that has been made more uncomfortable this week by a series of racial headaches that have intruded on the party’s efforts to project a new level of inclusiveness.

The tensions come amid a debate within the GOP on how best to lure new voters. The nation’s shifting demographics have caused some Republican leaders to worry not only about the party’s future but about winning in November, particularly in key swing states such as Virginia and Nevada.

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...despite a speaker lineup in Tampa that includes Artur Davis, a black former Democratic congressman; former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice; and Utah congressional candidate Mia Love, who would be the party’s first black congresswoman if she won in November, just 2 percent of convention delegates are black.

That’s according to an analysis by David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. Bositis also said that only two members of the 165-member RNC are black and that none of the leaders of the committees responsible for drafting the GOP platform and adopting the convention rules are black.

“This Republican Party base is white, aging and dying off,” he said.

Read more at The Washington Post.

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.

Mia Love is not a household name. But ask any savvy Republican here, and they’ll tell you the mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah, is one of the party’s political phenoms. Love, 37, is a congressional candidate for Utah’s 4th district. More importantly, she’s a black Mormon with sterling Tea Party credentials. This is the sort of improbable resume that earns you a coveted speaking slot on the convention’s first night — even when you’re down by double digits in one of the most conservative states in the U.S.

When Love took the stage in Tampa Tuesday night, the Utah delegation roared to life, whipping orange Love 4 Utah towels like rabid football fans. Even Stephen Sandstrom, a veteran of the state legislature whom Love beat for the nomination, looked gratified as she drew standing ovations. Love “says a lot about the state of Utah and about where we are as a country,” says Sandstrom, who hastened to add that he was a big supporter. “She’s combating stereotypes about what it means to be a Republican. We’re a big tent.”

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The diversity pageant is a timeworn tactic at Republican conventions. Soul singers performed at the 2000 convention in Philadelphia, when George W. Bush sought to bring more minority voters into the GOP fold. The number of black delegates peaked at 167 in 2004, 16.7% percent of the overall total. But it plummeted again in 2008, and this year’s confab in Tampa drew just 46 black delegates, according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and the Atlanta Journal Constitution. According to Pew, 87% of Republicans are white, a figure that has held steady since 2000.

Read more at TIME.

From the convention site in immigrant-heavy Florida to the multi-hued faces that will be visible on stage over the next several days, Republicans are clearly courting minority voters — particularly Latinos.

But as the television news cameras broadcast sweeping shots of delegates at the Republican National Convention, something else will be visible too: a sea of red, white and blue apparel — and white faces.

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This year, 46 Republican delegates are African-American, or about 2 percent of the total, according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. That is up from 36 in 2008, which was the lowest number in 40 years, but far less than the 167 black delegates in 2004, which was the highest since 1912, said David Bositis, senior political analyst for the Joint Center.

The Joint Center does not track Latino or other minority delegates, but the Republican convention is likely to have more Hispanic delegates than African Americans, he said.

Bositis found that 26 percent of the 4,000-plus delegates to the 2012 Democratic National Convention are African-American. He estimates that at least 40 percent of the Democratic delegates will be from minority groups.

Bositis said the GOP needs to broaden its appeal to minority voters or face irrelevance in the coming years as America becomes more diverse.

Read more at the Dayton Daily News.

Editor's note: With the 2012 Republican National Convention about to begin in Tampa, CNN asked veteran insiders Donna Brazile, Democratic strategist and former campaign chair for Vice President Al Gore's presidential bid, and Ari Fleischer, Republican communications expert and former press secretary for President George W. Bush, to give us their tips on how to navigate a political convention. Here are Brazile's tips.

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2. Watch the media for reports that track delegate diversity.
The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies has been tracking the ratio of minority delegates at the conventions for 40 years. In 2008, it found that 36 of the 2,380 Republican delegates were African-American. Women delegates were at a 40-year low. Another nearly all-white convention will make it hard for the Republicans to sell themselves as a majority party.

Read more at CNN.

It is becoming abundantly clear that the opponents of President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act care little about minority health.

David Bositis, senior research director for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, has observed in the {Washington Post} that about 36 percent of African Americans have no health insurance (compared to approximately 12 percent of Caucasians).

“Because Americans of Color suffer from hypertension, diabetes and cancer at twice the rates of Caucasians,” he notes, “insurance companies, when permitted to do so, exclude us more often from coverage.”

“I wonder,” Mr. Bositis asks rhetorically, “why those who are fighting this law do not care about the high death rate and high rates of the illnesses of black Americans?”

Read more at The Afro.

The performance by the Rev. William Owens at the National Press Club last week was enough to make a cynic blush. In a nearly empty room, as the C-SPAN cameras rolled, Owens, a Tennessee minister and self-proclaimed leader of the civil rights movement called out the president for his changed position on same sex marriage.

“I didn’t march one inch, one foot, one yard, for a man to marry a man, and a woman to marry a woman,” he said.

Claiming to speak for thousands, he connected the prevalence of same-sex marriage to the collapse of the African-American family. And he threatened the president with a widespread revolt by black voters on Election Day. “He has not done a smart thing,” Owens said.

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“I would place the odds of African Americans defecting the president as about the same as the odds of an asteroid hitting the Earth and wiping out all human life,” says David Bositis at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. “It’s not going to happen.”


Read more at The Washington Post.