Speaking of Florida—and everyone’s been doing a lot of that since Trayvon Martin was shot dead in Sanford—it seems that the easier it gets to shoot in the Sunshine State, the harder it gets to vote.
The state Legislature down there seems more bent on protecting people’s rights to pack heat on the street than on safeguarding their rights to cast ballots in elections.
It’s worth thinking about because the same forces that have shaped the situation that way in Florida are at work in other places; a “Stand Your Ground” law protecting those who shoot on the street because they say they feel threatened, like the one that tied the hands of Sanford police when they should have arrested the man who shot Martin, has been proposed for Massachusetts, though it hasn’t been warmly received at the State House.
Just as Florida was caught up in the wave of laws passed in recent years to protect gun owners, it has also been caught up in the wave of legislation to make voting more difficult. Last year it passed a law making it harder to vote early—the early voting period was shortened from 14 days before Election Day to eight—and to register voters.
The new rules about registering voters were so daunting that the League of Women Voters, not ordinarily an organization lacking in purposefulness or determination, actually gave up registration efforts in Florida because of the heavy fines the law prescribes for people who turn in registration forms late. So did Rock the Vote, a group that concentrates on registering young people.
Previously, registration forms had to be turned in 10 days after they were collected; now they must be turned in only 48 hours after being signed, and a hefty $50 penalty is assessed the gatherer for each late form. Reporting by the New York Times conveys a sense of the chilling effect the new rules have had: “In Volusia County, where new registrations dropped by nearly a fifth compared with the same period four years ago, the supervisor of elections, Ann McFall, said that she attributed much of the change to the new law. ‘The drop-off is our League of Women Voters, our five universities in Volusia County, none of which are making a concentrated effort this year,’ Ms. McFall said.”
In general, laws that tend to restrict voter registration have the greatest effect on the young, whose residences are not as stable as older people’s, and the poor, a large proportion of whom are minorities. That may be a cliché, but it takes on added interest when considered in relation to the fact that wealthy people do get out to vote. According to a statistic cited by Chuck Collins of the Institute for Policy Studies in his new book 99 to 1, 64 percent of the “99 percent” voted in the election of 2008, while virtually 100 percent of the “1 percent”—the very richest—voted in that election.
In a society increasingly influenced by the income gap, it’s not hard to see who benefits if voting is made more difficult. Beyond that, is a society in which it becomes harder to exercise one’s right to vote even as it becomes easier to use deadly force on the street the kind of society Americans want?
