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January 26th, 2016 
Awake Goy 
Susanne Posel ,Chief Editor Occupy Corporatism | Co-Founder, Legacy Bio-Naturals
When it comes to voter ID laws, the Republicans have led the charge, making changes to existing laws and implementing new stricter laws when it comes to the electoral rights of minorities.
Michael Glick, attorney for the NAACP, said that this state “should be making it easier for people to engage in the fundamental right to vote, not harder” and asserted that these laws are unconstitutional because they violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In North Carolina, state Republican lawmakers changed voting rules in order to “ease the photo ID requirements” but ended up making them immensely more restrictive:
• All but eliminated early voting
• Require a photo ID
• Ended same-day voter registration
• Prohibited casting ballots out of precinct
• Ended pre-registration for teenagers
Other limitations on voting rights include “narrowly limiting the number of acceptable forms of ID” and the necessity of voters to sign a “reasonable impediment declaration” explaining why they did not have an ID. Without an ID, voters would be reduced to casting provisional ballots “that would be counted after county elections officials verified the voters’ reasons.”
These new voter restrictions have caught the attention of the NAACP and the Department of Justice (DoJ) who have initiated a lawsuit against the new voter restrictions that reminded them of the Jim Crow laws that were quite popular between the 1800s right up until the mid-1960s.
William Barber, president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP, commented : “The right to vote is supposed to be constitutional, not confusing. North Carolina’s restrictive photo-ID law remains an immoral and unconstitutional burden on voters that creates two unequal tiers of voters. We are prepared to challenge this modern form of Jim Crow in the courts even as we continue our grassroots work.”
As with North Carolina, the Alabama voter ID law is restrictive for minorities because they require “those voting to have photo identification, such as a driver’s license, before casting ballots.”
Last year the NAACP sued to block the implementation of the law on the grounds that “it placed an unfair burden on black and Latino voters in the state” because those minority groups “have less access to transportation than other groups in Alabama, and less ability to get the required identification.”
This state was also the scene of a recent mass closing of DMV locations in counties with the highest percentage of non-white registered voters “due to budget cuts”.
Shockingly, every county where African-Americans make up more than 75% of the registered voter count had their DMV office closed. The inconvenience was made more acute by the fact that Alabama requires a state-issued ID, which must be obtained by a DMV location.
For some, the trek to a DMV location was about 186 miles, or a 3 hour drive.
After getting tons of bad press, Alabama Governor Robert Bentley offered the possibility of reopening one DMV location for one day a month in those counties that had theirs shutdown to “reduce long lines and waiting times”.
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