NAACP to Call on UN to Investigate Voter Disfranchisement in
US
	Delegation to travel to Geneva to tell human rights
	council that attempt is being made to restrict black
	and Latino right to vote

by Ed Pilkington in New York

Guardian (UK)

March 9, 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/09/naacp-un-voter-disfranchisement-us

The leaders of the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People, the NAACP, will travel to Geneva next
week to tell the UN human rights council that a co-ordinated
legislative attempt is being made by states across America
to disfranchise millions of black and Latino voters in
November's presidential election.

The delegation, headed by the NAACP's president, Benjamin
Jealous, will address the council on Wednesday and call on
the UN body to launch a formal investigation into the spread
of restrictive electoral laws, particularly in southern
states. The NAACP intends to invite a UN team to travel
across America to see for itself the impact of the new laws,
which it argues are consciously designed to suppress
minority voting.

The UN has no power to intervene in the workings of
individual American states. But Jealous told the Guardian
that the UN had a powerful weapon in its armoury: shame.

"Shame alone is effective. The US, and individual states
within the US that have introduced these laws, have a vested
interest in maintaining the opinion that we are the world's
leading democracy. That means something," Jealous said.

In the NAACP's view, the voting rights of black and other
minority groups are under more threat from laws restricting
their participation at the ballot box than at any time since
the segregationist days of Jim Crow.

A recent report by the Brennan Center for Justice estimated
that since last year more than 5 million eligible voters had
had their right to vote stripped from them.

There are already 19 new laws on the books in 14 different
states, which between them account for 63% of the 270
electoral votes needed to win the US presidential race in
November. Some laws involve a requirement to show photo
identification in polling stations - disproportionately
hitting black and elderly people, who often do not have such
ID.

Other laws have cut back on early voting schemes, heavily
used by ethnic minority and older people, and still others
disfranchise former convicted prisoners, even in some cases
years after their sentences were completed.

The NAACP delegation to Geneva comes in the wake of a march
that is under way from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to mark
the 47th anniversary of the famous civil rights march. The
marchers, sponsored in part by the Service Employees
International Union, have followed Highway 80 - as did the
campaigners in 1965 - and arrived in Montgomery on Thursday
night and will stage a rally at the state capitol on Friday.
The purpose is partly commemorative, to recall the events of
7 March 1965, when about 600 civil rights campaigners were
attacked by police on so-called "Bloody Sunday" as they
tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

But this year the commemoration has acquired a distinct
contemporary poignancy as a result of the plethora of voter
ID laws that have been introduced over the past year, as
well as the anti-immigration laws that have spread across
several states, including Alabama's own HB56.

The immigration laws require local police forces to arrest
anyone they suspect of being unlawful immigrants in an
attempt to force undocumented Hispanics to quit the country.
Alabama's HB56 is considered the most swingeing.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an order today
temporarily halting two sections of the bill. But if fully
implemented they would make companies that employ
undocumented workers liable to punishment, cut off
undocumented families from public utilities such as water
supplies, and oblige teachers to investigate the status of
their pupils.

The encroachment of two such controversial sets of laws
across a growing number of states has brought African
American and Latino activists together on the Selma-
Montgomery march. The union was symbolised in posters
carried by the marchers proclaiming: "I have a dream - say
no to HB56."

Theodore Branch, 74, one of the original Selma marchers in
1965, was marching again. He said the rise of the new voter
ID laws "just carry me back to 1964. They are trying to take
the rights away from us again - hell, they don't want blacks
or Asians voting."

Kemba Smith will be among the NAACP delegation to Geneva
next week. Smith will not be allowed to vote in November's
presidential election under a Virginia law that
disfranchises anyone convicted of a felony.

Smith was released and granted clemency by President Clinton
in 2001 on her 24-year sentence. Clinton was struck by the
fact that Smith was convicted for the drug trafficking of
her then crack-addicted boyfriend, even though prosecutors
acknowledged that she herself had never sold, handled or
used any drugs.

The law under which she is still disfranchised today was
passed by a Virginia state convention in 1901. One of the
attendants told the convention at the time that it would
"eliminate the darkie 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 government."

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