According to a tally by AL.com columnist John Archibald, eight of the 10 Alabama counties with the highest percentage of non-white registered voters saw their driver’s license offices closed.
“Every single county in which blacks make up more than 75 percent of registered voters will see their driver license office closed. Every one,” Archibald wrote.
Archibald also noted that many of the counties where offices were closed also leaned Democrat.
“But maybe it’s not racial at all, right? Maybe it’s just political. And let’s face it, it may not be either.” he wrote. “But no matter the intent, the consequence is the same.”
The voter ID law passed in 2011 — which tightened previous ID requirements –includes driver’s licenses on a very short list of government-issued photo IDs accepted in order to vote in the state. If a resident does not have the proper ID he or she must get two poll officials to vouch for his or her identity. Additionally, residents without photo ID can apply for a free state photo ID. The law was put into effect in 2014.
Before Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley ® signed the voter ID legislation, the ACLU-Alabama said it would have “a disproportionate negative impact on minority voters,” noting that 62 percent of black Alabama residents depend on public transport, compared to 34 percent of whites.
From 2015 but worth remembering how rigged elections are these days and for whom they’re rigged to support and to harm.
Jeff Bezos is sitting on $97 billion because of stuff like this
Amazon made $47B in gross profits in 2016. They have 540,000 employees.
If they gave every employee a $5/hr wage increase and increased their workforce by 10% to reduce time pressures on individual workers, it would cost them between $6B and $9B per year (assuming 40 to 60 hr average work week), still leaving about $40B in gross profits. That’s still a ridiculously huge amount of money being made.
But capitalists always want to squeeze out ever more profits and this is always done by exploiting workers.
Marvin is a wonderful, sweet gentleman who lives in a tiny boarding house in Atlanta. We met him this summer and we started working to get him an ID. But Marvin was born in a Jim Crow town that didn’t give birth certificates to black babies. It’s tough enough to get a birth certificate REPLACED, but when you never had one in the first place… that’s a challenge.
So, we had to FOIA the Social Security Administration for something called a Numident Record.
It costs $27.
….It’s basically a history of your Social Security life and in some states, for some forms of ID, if you are a certain age you can use it in place of a birth certificate.
As you can imagine, the SSA is not the fastest agency in the world. It took almost four months to get Marvin’s ID. Our amazing volunteer Karen was on the phone with them every week trying to find out when they would mail the record. And Marvin was calling me every week because this ID means everything to him.
You see, Marvin is trapped in his home because in order to take wheelchair-accessible public transportation you need an ID to sign up. Seriously.
Not only that, but he is spending most of his income on rent for his very small room in the boarding house. He has an opportunity for better, less expensive housing but, you guessed it, he needs ID…
[T]his morning, Karen took Marvin to the DMV and he got his ID!
It cost us $189.
When we went to Marvin’s house this summer and told him that we were getting him an ID, he asked how much it would cost. We told him we would pay for everything and he started to cry. Because, like every single person we work with, he knew that he would never be able to afford an ID on his own.
This was one of the toughest cases we have had so far and it is exactly why I started Spread The Vote. Because voter ID is voter suppression. Because IDs are about a lot more than voting. Because we are changing lives every single day.
Jim Crow segregation and racism had a strange and robust career outside of the South, especially in that supposed bastion of liberalism, New York City. Citizens at every level of New York society gave it life: journalists at national newspapers, wealthy suburban homeowners, working-class renters, university bureaucrats, police commissioners, mayors, union leaders and criminal court judges.
Many did so at the same time they condemned racism in the South. Indeed, one of the longest-standing facets of Northern racism and segregation was the constant deflection to the problems in the South. “Ultraliberal New York had more integration problems than Mississippi,” Malcolm X observed. “The North’s liberals have been for so long pointing accusing fingers at the South and getting away with it that they have fits when they are exposed as the world’s worst hypocrites.”
