Reports of new voter i.d. laws and the negative impact to Obama's election-nite tally should have us all a bit concerned. Many of the folks that voted for Obama in 2008 will not be able to vote for him this time around. I mention this to conservative friends of mine and they're like
"it's 2012... who doesn't have an i.d. in this day and age?"
It is hard to believe really. I've read a lot about who these people are, and I try to explain. The fact is though, that these laws are in effect and there will be an impact. Republicans, where they can, have changed the requirements for voting.
We shouldn't take this sitting down.
Seems to me that we should be organizing a massive effort to reach out to these affected folks, to help them get these new credentials. I've not seen or heard of any national effort, or even state effort to do this. As matter-of-fact, recently I contacted the Obama campaign and spoke to someone there working on Voter I.D. asked them what was being done, I don't recall anything concrete, I begged them to seriously consider a campaign to work on this... He assured me that they were doing things in the various states. He gave me a website that I could contact for my state, Indiana. Later that day I called up this website and it was not even a valid website.
As a Hoosier, I do take some comfort in the fact that we've had voter I.D. law in effect even before 2008, and Obama was able to win the state last time around.
I'm linking to Wikipedia that has a map showing voter i.d. for 2012...
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Am I being overly concerned? Looking at the map one can see that most of these laws are in the red states. But some are in swing states, Wisconsin, Florida, Colorado, Ohio, Virginia... Is there a big effort going on in those places to help folks get what they need? Seems a good use of money to get people, that you know will vote for you, to be properly credentialed so that they may vote.