Oh, we were suffering until suffrage,
Not a woman here could vote, no matter what age,
Then the 19th Amendment struck down that restrictive rule. (Oh yeah!)

It was 88 years ago today that the 19th Amendment of the Constitution was certified, guaranteeing women the right to vote in this country. And this day brings cause to celebrate a huge step towards universal suffrage — or, put more simply, expanding the right to vote to every man and woman in America.

It’s stunning to think of how far we’ve come. In 1919, a woman couldn’t enter a voting booth. In 2008, a woman serves as Secretary of State. A woman serves as Speaker of the House. And America very nearly saw its first woman on the presidential ballot.

In recent years, women have consistently cast a majority of votes in presidential elections. In this exhilarating election year, women are once again poised to represent a greater piece of the electoral pie than men.

But sometimes the appearance of progress fails to tell the whole story.

There are still far too many barriers that stand in the way of truly universal suffrage. According to a census data analysis by Project Vote (PDF), restrictions on the right to vote, like state photo identification laws, are likely to harm women voters (as well as minorities, people with disabilities, and senior citizens) disproportionately.

They found:

• Women are more than twice as likely as men not to have a drivers’ license.
• One of every five senior women does not have a license.
• Of all Americans without a license, over 70 percent are women.

So let’s celebrate today, but never take our eyes off the prize, because we’re not there yet. The obstacles to full voting equality aren’t what they were, but they’re not what they should be: nonexistent. Until that day, we’ll have to keep fighting to end disenfranchising laws and practices that stand in the way of voting equality.

Fusion voting is working so well in New York and other states that it is beginning to enjoy a revival. Connecticut reinstituted it. Massachusetts is studying reinstating it.

But contrary to this national trend, South Carolina came by its fusion voting accidentally, and has been trying to expel it from its body politic ever since, including a legislative attempt to kill it last year.

The latest attempt is its poison-pill “sore loser” code that the legislature is trying to enforce against Eugene Platt, the Green Party candidate for a South Carolina House seat. Because Platt failed to win the endorsement of the Democratic Party, the South Carolina Election Commission decided that Platt was ineligible to appear on the ballot under the Green Party banner.

The ACLU has filed a lawsuit today to put Platt on the ballot in November on the Green Party line.

Bryan Sells, a senior staff counsel with the ACLU Voting Rights Project, has never seen the “sore loser” code enforced the way South Carolina is seeking to do.

“The Green Party just had its nominee vetoed by Democrats,” he said. “They’ve had the rug pulled out from under them. If I lived in that district and I support Eugene Platt, I’d be mad as hell.”

Platt won the nomination of a recognized party but is being bounced. Not only is the effort anti-democratic, it changes party power, party dynamics in really pernicious ways. Fusion increases democratic choices that voters have. But fusion voting, combined with this so-called “sore loser” code, reduces those choices.

According to the 2000 U.S. Census, the city of Bethel has a population of 5,471, 61.8 percent of whom are Alaska Native or American Indian. So to say this decision affects a lot of people would be an understatement.

The decision requires the state to provide trained poll workers who are bilingual in English and Yup’ik; sample ballots in written Yup’ik; a written Yup’ik glossary of election terms; consultation with local tribes to ensure the accuracy of Yup’ik translations; a Yup’ik language coordinator; and pre-election and post-election reports to the court tracking the state’s efforts.

Prior to the lawsuit, Alaska was in violation of the language assistance provisions of the Voting Rights Act by not adequately translating voting materials or election information into Yup’ik. One egregious example of how poor translations to Yup’ik were: A translation of a 2002 statewide natural gas ballot question used the Yup’ik word for flatulence.

That really says it all (or something).

Isn’t the right to vote freely for a candidate of your choosing just that: the right to vote freely for a candidate of your choosing?

Not according to one Virginia legislator, who seemed to forget the whole principle of small "d" democracy when he characterized efforts to educate people with felony convictions about their right to vote as a big "D" Democratic conspiracy. "I don’ t know a lot of young Republicans who end up being felons," C. Todd Gilbert told The Washington Post. "Clearly the groups that are soliciting these felons to get their rights restored are predisposed to be in support of Obama, and I am sure this registration effort is designed to help their candidate."

(By way of background, a patchwork of state felony disfranchisement laws, inconsistent from state to state, prevent a whopping 5.3 million Americans with past felony—and, in seven states, misdemeanor—convictions from voting. More are disfranchised by general confusion about and elections officials’ misapplication of these laws.)

Even if we indulge the Gilberts of the world momentarily, all we have to do is scratch the surface to see that plenty of Republicans have helped reform their states’ disfranchisement policies in favor of greater enfranchisement. (Not to mention the fact that people of all political persuasions go to prison; just check out this New York Times interview with people incarcerated in Maine and Vermont.)

Louisiana’s Republican Governor Bobby Jindal just signed a bill that requires the Department of Public Safety and Corrections to notify people leaving its custody about voting rights restoration and to provide them with a voter registration form. Jindal is in good company. It was Florida’s Republican Governor Charlie Crist who revised his state’s antiquated law last year to ease voter restoration for some people with nonviolent felony convictions. And George W. Bush, when he was Governor of Texas, signed a bill eliminating the state’s two-year waiting period before voting rights could be restored.

These distinguished gentlemen are joined in their support of increased access to the polls for this population by Jack Kemp (former Congressman and Republican Vice-Presidential candidate) and Chuck Colson (Nixon’s former Chief Counsel), and no one questions their Republican cred. In fact, a diverse array of organizations has spoken in favor of greater enfranchisement, including the American Probation and Parole Association, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the American Correctional Association.

Felony disfranchisement’s nasty roots in voter suppression should remind us that promoting access to the polls for all eligible voters is fundamental to the health of our democracy. Following the Civil War, Southern states faced the enfranchisement of large African-American populations as a result of the 15th Amendment; in response, they scrambled to maintain white rule by, among other things, enacting or reforming felony disfranchisement laws in order to curtail African-Americans’ access to the polls.

Mississippi, for example, revised its constitution to impose disfranchisement as a penalty only for the crimes of which African-Americans were most frequently convicted. When Virginia’s disfranchisement laws were debated at the state’s 1901-1902 Constitutional Convention, one delegate argued that felon disfranchisement would "eliminate the darkey as a political factor in this state in less than five years, so that in no single county…will there be the least concern felt for the complete supremacy of the white race in the affairs of the government."

Over 100 years later, felony disfranchisement laws remain in effect and continue to restrict the political power of communities of color and individuals of all stripes. This is not a partisan issue, it’s a democracy issue. The Washington Post, Boston Globe and Roanoke Times agree. See, C. Todd Gilbert? The right to vote is something we can all get behind.

Alabama disfranchises people with felony convictions involving “moral turpitude.” According to the state constitution, only the legislature can determine what crimes fit into this antiquated-sounding category. But that didn’t stop Attorney General Troy King from creating his own broader list of disqualifying felonies in 2005. The AG’s list included several nonviolent offenses, including forgery. That’s right, forgery.

To make matters worse, election administrators across Alabama are currently disqualifying citizens from voting for felony convictions that neither the legislature nor the attorney general has ever listed as disfranchising offenses.

Check out today’s excellent New York Times story on the case that features ACLU Voting Rights Project Director Laughlin McDonald and one of our clients, Annette McWashington Pruitt, who was disfranchised because of a 2003 conviction for receiving stolen property, an offense not on the legislature’s list of moral turpitude felonies. She said in our press release:

“I have voted many times before. My father taught me this is what every American should do. But when I tried to register a few weeks ago I was told I couldn’t. My youngest son just turned 18 and is going into the Navy. I have another son in Iraq right now. Voting is really my duty because it represents the freedom my sons are protecting overseas.”

This shameful policy has no place in a functioning democracy. We are confident that the court will see the moral rectitude in giving Alabamians their fundamental rights back before the November elections.

"Influx of Voters Expected to Test New Technology" said The New York Times.

USA Today weighed in with a double-barreled output, "Study: Poor ballot designs still affect U.S. elections" and "Ballot designs are ‘literacy test for voters.’"

All three accounts rely essentially on Better Ballots (PDF), a report that the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law put out this week on how poorly designed ballots continue to undermine elections in the United States.

The study concludes that ballot issues and other problems continue despite Congress setting aside $3 billion to overhaul voting systems across the nation to prevent a repeat of the Florida ballot problems that deadlocked the 2000 presidential race.

The New York Times story is even more ominous: Even as the campaigns and different organizations race to register new voters for November, election officials across the nation are struggling to introduce spanking new technologies and hire staff to work during the election.

All these portend a tsunami of problems and obstacles come Election Day.

How is it that eight years after the Florida fiasco and the impressively problem-plagued voting in Ohio during the 2004 presidential election do we find ourselves, on the eve of another presidential election, in arguably a worse position than we were?

Even as many bemoan the problems with hanging chads and which votes were eventually counted in the 2000 presidential election, more serious violations of civil rights and liberties occurred when Florida officials prevented an unprecedented number of people from voting for various reasons.

A vast majority of this group were African-Americans in urban areas.

Again, in Ohio in 2004, among the myriad problems that plagued those communities were the significant number of voters, especially African-Americans and urban dwellers, who could not vote because of problems with voting machines, too few voting machines, or a myriad of other problems.

It is against that background that the Brennan Center study and the attending news stories do not come as welcome news at all. The problems that beset those two previous election cycles—and every election in between and since—have not been corrected. An argument could even be made that the problems have worsened.

The ACLU’s interest in the 2008 elections is what it has always been: free and fair elections and expanding access for voters. We fight for the disenfranchised to have access to the ballot not because of who they eventually vote for, but because it is our historic mission to extend the franchise.

We don’t know where or what the flashpoint will be this political season. Our aim should be to ensure that these elections are seen by the entire world to be free and fair; and that no one who is qualified to vote is denied the opportunity to vote.

That is why we will continue to fight for voters as well as monitor the voting on November 4.

Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan opposes the amendment, citing that it could prevent approximately 240,000 eligible Missourians from casting a vote because they can’t get prove their citizenship. She adds that there have been no cases of voter impersonation fraud in the state.

Arizona passed a similar measure back in 2004; it’s been tied up in the courts since it passed, and has never taken effect. The case, Intertribal Council of Ariz. Inc. v. Brewer, is awaiting trial in district court; the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project and the ACLU of Arizona are part of the coalition that’s suing the state.

Last week during its Democratic primary, Indiana had the dubious distinction of refusing the vote to a group of nuns in their 80s and 90s because they didn’t have government-issued IDs. The nuns have said they will try to get the proper IDs before the November election, but unfortunately, none of them drive, so that’s going to be a challenge in itself.

Cognizant of this event, the Joplin Globe reports:

…Diana Oleskevich, justice coordinator for the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, nonetheless expressed concerns. She said a ’significant number of bright, intelligent women’ in that St. Louis-based religious community ‘long ago gave up driving.

‘They’re in their 80s and 90s now and are hard pressed to get the documents they need to vote,’ she said.

Suppressing the nun vote: Just icing on the cake of unconstitutional voting rights restriction.

The most incomprehensible part about this decision: that the Supreme Court is allowing Indiana to try a fix a problem that never existed in the first place. As we pointed out in September, Indiana has never had a case of in-person voter fraud, which is exactly the kind of voter fraud that this voter ID law would ostensibly prevent. Walter Dellinger and Sri Srinivasan put it best in an article in Slate in January, when the case was argued before the high court:

[T]his kind of fraud would be an exceedingly irrational way to attempt to affect the outcome of an election. For starters, the impersonator would need to know that the actual registered voter would not herself be showing up to vote. If the real voter had already voted, the impersonator would be exposed at once. And in any event, why would any sane person risk going to prison to influence an election by one vote? It is all the more implausible to imagine an army of impersonators coordinating their efforts on a scale that could affect an election, let alone doing so without being detected.

The silver lining of this dark election year decision? This isn’t over. There are more than 20 states with similar laws and the today’s decision opened the door for future lawsuits. This isn’t the last you’ll hear of this issue.

As in 47 other states across the nation, Georgia disqualifies otherwise-eligible voters who are convicted of felonies, a practice known as felony disfranchisement. Officially, this practice - which traces its ancestry to post-Civil War attempts by southern states to limit the political participation of newly-enfranchised African-Americans - has led to the disfranchisement of over 5.3 million Americans. In practice, however, its implications are much broader, extending to voters like those in Muscogee County who are erroneously disqualified by elections officials struggling to implement complex disfranchisement policies.

As the Ledger-Enquirer reported, Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel’s office recently began using a computer program to determine which voters must be disqualified due to felony convictions,comparing information received from the county courts with information in the Georgia Department of Corrections and statewide voter registration databases. This process generated far more names than it should have, including many voters whose names - but not necessarily other information - matched those of people with felony convictions. The list that went to Muscogee County was over-inclusive as a result, but the county nevertheless sent form letters to a majority of those individuals on the list, thus mistakenly purging hundreds of voters from the rolls.

The confusion is, no doubt, compounded by Georgia’s flawed and vague felony disfranchisement policy: Georgia law disfranchises people convicted of felonies involving “moral turpitude,” but no list of crimes that meets this definition exists.

This violation of the fundamental right to vote for as many as 700 Muscogee County voters - not to mention voters in other counties who may have been subject to the same errors - might remind you of similarly flawed “purges” of eligible voters in Florida and elsewhere in important election years. This issue must be taken seriously and remedied properly. Secretary of State Handel has advised citizens who receive the letter in error to call her office to correct it, but - as the ACLU noted in a letter to Secretary Handel yesterday - the burden should be on her to act affirmatively to correct her mistake and ensure that it is not repeated.

Voting is the bedrock of our democracy, but as long as felony disfranchisement exists, American voters will be vulnerable to these kinds of purges.

To learn more about the ACLU’s work to end felony disfranchisement, visit www.aclu.org/righttovote.

Laughlin authored “Ballot Security” and with rich examples it describes the partisan tactics used to disfranchise voters across the country. The essay’s title refers to the insidious “ballot security” measures designed by lawmakers to achieve an unfair electoral advantage under the guise of good government. They include the recent flurry of voter identification laws created to solve the non-existent problem of in-person voter fraud. Laws like these have a disproportionate impact on low-income individuals, racial and ethnic minorities, senior citizens, voters with disabilities and many other eligible voters who have neither a government-issued photo ID nor the money to obtain one.

Nothing is more fundamental to our democracy than the right to vote because, as the Supreme Court has ruled, voting is “preservative of all rights.” Rather than erecting hurdles that prevent Americans from voting, lawmakers must ensure that every eligible voter is allowed to vote, and that every vote counts.

Laughlin writes that “one of the enduring, and unconscionable, ironies of our democracy is the willingness of those with the power to try to limit the right to vote for racial and partisan reasons.” Soon the Supreme Court will make a decision in our voter ID lawsuit and decide whether or not the latest ironic power grab will pass constitutional muster.