It's criminal this is allowed to stand. We're effectively back to Jim Crow for black voters.

Brookings? @BrookingsInst

1 in every 4 African Americans in Florida was unable to vote in 2016

After the Shelby County v. Holder decision and leading up to the 2016 election, more stringent photo identification requirements have become the new “poll tax” for more than 21 million Americans, or 11 percent of the entire voting-eligible population without government-issued photo IDs. While North Carolina’s attacks on voter freedom may have been reprimanded by the Court, other states continue to enact tougher restrictions on historically and legally disenfranchised citizens.

Wisconsin’s efforts mirrored those in North Carolina where advocates purported that nearly 300,000 people lacked the proper ID to participate in the 2016 presidential election, even after parts of the state’s law were deemed unconstitutional upon appeal. In Florida, 1.5 million people were disenfranchised by a law that disqualifies ex-felons from voting, resulting in one in every four African American residents unable to vote in 2016.

Added to these actions, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has begun unraveling any Obama-era work on voting rights, starting with the Department of Justice’s withdrawal of its claim of the discriminatory intent in Texas ID laws...

read more: http://brook.gs/2tu1IxB

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Speaking at his final White House press conference, President Obama offered a reminder of the racist history behind some U.S. voting restrictions.

“The reason that we are the only country among advanced democracies that makes it harder to vote … traces directly back to Jim Crow and the legacy of slavery,” Obama said, arguing that “there is an ugly history to [voting rights] that we should not be shy about talking about.”

The president expressed concern about continued efforts to restrict voting rights and said, “I hope that people pay attention to making sure everybody has a chance to vote… make it easier, not harder.”

“The notion that there are a whole bunch of people out there who are going out there and want to vote and are not eligible to vote — we have the opposite problem. We have people who are eligible to vote who don’t vote,” he said. “And so the idea that we put in place a whole bunch of barriers to people voting doesn’t makes sense.”