The Republican-led North Carolina state government is doing its best to ensure that people of color, especially blacks, whose enormous turnout helped President Obama, have limited impact on elections.

Black North Carolinians are protesting measures that implicitly seek to disenfranchise them.

 

State lawmakers in the current legislative session are expected to pass bills that would stop same-day voter registration, reduce the early-voting period, end balloting on the Sunday before Election Day and impose a five-year wait for ex-convicts to regain the voting privilege.

 

And parents of college students, beware: If your son or daughter registers to vote at a school address, you would lose your $2,500 child-dependency tax deduction.

 

And because it seems that no Republican-led state is complete without imposing a photo-identification law on voters, that requirement is also expected to pass soon in the Tar Heel State. (If you thought the voter-ID debate ended with last year’s election, think again: The proposal was introduced in 12 more states this year and is now pending in 30 states.)

 

Opponents say that voter-ID laws can disproportionately harm blacks, Latinos, seniors and young people who don’t have government-issued photo identification. Critics say that this population includes as many as 30,000 registered voters in North Carolina.

 

The proposals are the latest of several moves by the Legislature and newly elected Republican Gov. Pat McCrory that have ignited protests and arrests of dozens of demonstrators at the state capitol in Raleigh. The demonstrators, led by a range of groups such as the NAACP and Raging Grannies, returned to the capitol on Monday, when more than four dozen people were arrested.

Read more at The Root.

 

If Republicans succeed in North Carolina, it’s quite possible that other conservative states will attempt similar tactics.

 

Why is the disenfranchisement of people of color only addressed during election time? W

hat can be done between elections to make sure that anyone who wants to vote can?

Sound off below!!!!