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.

When President Barack Obama arrives in New Orleans on Wednesday to speak before the National Urban League annual conference, he will touch down in a state where his party, less than a month before the qualifying deadline, has yet to find a congressional candidate for any district outside the black-majority seat held by Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-New Orleans.

For Sen. Karen Carter Peterson, D-New Orleans, who seized control of the party from Buddy Leach in April, it is a year for "grassroots rebuilding." But so too was last year, when the party failed to field a single major candidate for any statewide office, including governor.

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"Black voters and elected officials have less influence now than at any time since the civil rights era," David Bositis, an analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, wrote in a stark analysis late last year. It is the culmination of nearly a half-century process that began with the dismantling of Jim Crow, the empowerment of black voters and an explosion in black representation, but that now finds its ironic coda in a once-dominating Democrat Party transformed into a largely African-American enterprise that is only occasionally able to scrounge enough white votes to compete effectively outside black districts. The result has been the loss of legislative control in every Southern state save Arkansas.

Read more at the Times-Picayune.

The cliche "every vote counts" is sure to get a workout this election season. A new report from the National Urban League says the African-American vote could play a critical role in November. Host Michel Martin talks with Chanelle Hardy of the National Urban League and David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

Read more at National Public Radio.

From National Public Radio's Tell Me More. The cliche "every vote counts" is sure to get a workout this election season. A new report from the National Urban League says the African-American vote could play a critical role in November. Host Michel Martin talks with Chanelle Hardy of the National Urban League and David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

On largely a party-line vote, legislators agreed Thursday to allow Secretary of State Ross Miller to spend $800,000 for a voter registration effort.

Two of the nine Republicans and all 12 Democrats on the Interim Finance Committee backed the plan, which Democrat Miller said was prompted in part by a lawsuit from the NAACP, La Raza and other groups against his office, which oversees voting in Nevada.

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Some Republicans questioned whether the voter drive was necessary. They said that political parties themselves are registering voters and that the funds should be used to buy or maintain voting machines.

None of them mentioned the obvious: that studies by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found 95 percent of blacks and 66 percent of Hispanics voted for Democrat Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election, and a voter registration drive might lead to more voting by minorities in November, with Obama on the ballot again.

Read more at the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

President Obama pleased gays and lesbians when he endorsed same-sex marriage. He thrilled women when he signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

But when it comes to African Americans, a group that gave Obama 96 percent of its votes, there is disappointment over what many believe is the president's failure to address their concerns.

With black unemployment at 14 percent - nearly double the rate among whites - and a steep rise in rise in poverty and incarceration rates, many blacks are expressing frustration at the president's leadership.

While no one expects African Americans to make an exodus to presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, there is concern among Democrats over whether Obama will benefit from as large a turnout and the same level of enthusiasm as he enjoyed in 2008.

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David Bositis, who studies African American voting patterns at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, said Obama will need strong black support to keep several states in "the Democratic column."


Read more at the Pasedena Star-News.

When presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney appears before Latino small-business owners in Washington on Wednesday, he'll address a group whose explosive birth rates foreshadow a seismic political shift in GOP strongholds in the Deep South and Southwest.

"The Republicans' problem is their voters are white, aging and dying off," said David Bositis, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, who studies minority political engagement.

"There will come a time when they suffer catastrophic losses with the realization of the population changes."

Over the next several generations, the wave of minority voters -- who, according to U.S. Census figures released this week, now represent more than half of the nation's population born in the past year -- will become more of a power base in places like Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia. That hold will extend across the Southwest all the way to California, experts say.

Read more at CNN.