Located on the National Mall, the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial is now open to the public. But even as Washington prepares to honor Reverend King, our communities' voting rights are being aggressively stripped away by GOP politicians across the country. Before the Civil Rights Movement, most Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders could not vote, intermarry, buy a home, or seek recourse against political or economic discrimination. Even as we look back thankfully at the Civil Rights Movement as well as past APA civil rights heroes, we must organize to protect these rights against right-wing aggression. This blog post is a primer on what is happening and what these developments mean for APA communities.

Activists combat racial discrimination at the ballot box every election, but recent GOP efforts to make it harder for citizens to vote have been unprecedented in their scope and coordination. In a recent New York Times editorial ("A Poll Tax by Another Name"), civil rights hero Congressman John Lewis (D-Georgia) explains the magnitude of what is happening: "Since January, a majority of state legislatures have passed or considered election-law changes that, taken together, constitute the most concerted effort to restrict the right to vote since before the Voting Rights Act of 1965."

Ari Berman of Rolling Stones Magazine put it this way: ("The GOP War on Voting")

Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots.

The APA voter base disproportionately falls into these categories, and the GOP is passing these laws not out of 'principle,' but because they know that these groups lean Democratic in elections. Republicans aren't directly telling democratic-leaning constituencies such as Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders that they can't vote. Instead, voter suppression takes the following forms.

1) Requiring multiple forms of government-issued photo-identification during voter registration: This disproportionately affects low-income, elderly, and minority voters, who often don't have such documents, particularly if they don't have a drivers license. 10% of Americans, including 25% of African-Americans, don't have such identification. (Does anyone have statistics on APA citizens?)

Note: Republicans often raise the spectre of 'massive voter fraud' to justify these requirements, even though studies consistently show that there is no voter-fraud problem. From 2002-2007, the Department of Justice convicted 86 people for voter fraud, a .000000286% rate of fraud.

2) Adding insult to injury, requiring multiple forms of government photo-identification at the voting booth: Voters at the voting booth have already registered to vote, having met the necessary identification requirements during that process. Also, see (1).

3) Making it much harder for non-profit organizations and civic groups to register voters:  States such as Florida have imposed mountains of bureaucratic restrictions, registrations, and regulations on voter registrars, requiring them to submit collected registration forms within 48 hours or risk a $1000 fine, requiring approval for all voter-registration events, etc. The effect of these developments is to severely hamper non-profit organizations' ability to register new voters.

Many APA voters, especially in ethnic enclaves, low-income neighborhoods, or senior housing, depend on non-partisan civic and non-profit organizations while registering to vote, especially when there are language-access issues involved.

4) Preventing students from voting where they attend college: This one may be of dubious legality, but efforts abound in places from Wisconsin to Texas to Rhode Island to prevent students, who lean liberal, from voting where they attend college, even if they reside in their college towns.  Obviously, APA students attending college away from home may plan to live in their new communities, and even if they don't, have a democratic right to choose whether they want to participate in the elections of their homes and vote on policies that directly affect them. Democratic college students from solid-blue states such as California or New York may want to use their votes somewhere more valuable as well.

5) Preventing college students from voting, Part II: Wisconsin, South Carolina, Texas, and other states have passed laws disallowing college students from using their student ID's, even state-issued student ID's from public universities, at the voting booth. See (4) above.

6) Preventing ex-felons who have served their time from voting: This one's truly disgusting. States such as Florida, Iowa, Virginia, and Kentucky do not restore voting privileges to ex-felons who have finished paying their debts to so society by serving prison-time. This disproportionately affects people of color.

7) Restricting voter registration: Citizens who want to vote for the first time must register to vote. People of color, especially Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, are under-registered to vote, and and have low voter-turnout rates in most elections. For President Obama's election, minority voters of all backgrounds registered to vote in record-numbers, scaring the Republican Party and spurring all of the actions above. States across the country are restricting the ability of voters to register: shortening the time period in which new voters can register, shortening the operation hours of registrars, pushing up registration deadlines earlier and earlier, rescinding election-day registration, etc.

When the percentage of eligible APA's that vote is in the 30's, shouldn't policy makers be doing everything they can to increase our communities' turnout rates?

8) Restricting absentee balloting: Many working, low-income, and elderly APA's simply cannot make it to the polls on election day. Republicans in many states are restricting absentee balloting through many of the tactics listed in (3) and (7).

These and other tactics will prevents millions of voters from being able to vote next year. 38 states have considered one or more of the above legislative changes, and at least 15 have already passed such measures, including: (Not a comprehensive list; feel free to fill in the blanks in the comments!)

State Name: #'s from list above passed in state (Notes on pertinance to APA communities and the 2012 elections)

Alabama: 1, 2 (1.2% AAPI, recently passed one of the cruelest anti-immigrant bills in the country modeled after AZ SB1070)

Florida: 3, 6, 8 (2.5% AAPI and growing fast, critical swing state in 2012 Presidential election)

Georgia: 1, 2, 8 (3.3% AAPI, 2nd fastest growing AAPI population in the country, including rapidly growing Korean community in Atlanta, recently passed the toughest SB1070-modeled anti-immigrant bill in the nation)

Indiana: 2, 5 (1.6% AAPI)

Iowa: 6 (1.6% AAPI)

Kansas: 1, 2 (2.7% AAPI)

Maine: 7 (1.2% AAPI)

Minnesota: 2 (3.5% AAPI, rapidly growing community, especially Hmong and other Southeast Asian American groups)

Missouri: 2 (1.7%)

Ohio: 8 (1.8% and rapidly growing, key battleground state in 2012 Presidential Election)

Rhode Island: 4, 5 (3.3% AAPI)

South Carolina: 1, 2, 5  (Key state in 2008 Obama election)

Tennessee: 2, 8 (1.6% AAPI)

Texas: 2, 5 (4.0% AAPI, one of the fastest growing, diverse AAPI populations in the country, especially around Houston and Dallas)

Virginia: 1, 2 (5.5% AAPI, rapidly growing, including significant Korean, South Asian, and Southeast Asian American communities, particularly in Northern Virginia)

West Virginia: 2, 8 (0.7% AAPI)

Wisconsin: 2, 5 (2.3% AAPI, fast-growing Hmong and Southeast Asian American communities)

The above list isn't comprehensive, and what's more, similar measures are being introduced and debated in 38 states across the country. These laws have a disproportionate impact on APA voters, and what's more, are unevenly and discriminatorially applied to Asian American and Pacific Islander voters. This article (Link) by attorneys at New York based Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund detail how, even before these discriminatory laws were passed, APA voters are consistently underserved at the polls. Voter registration problems, longer lines in minority neighborhoods, completely inadequate translation services (even in states where language access is legally required!), racism and condescension from poll workers towards immigrant voters, elevated scrutiny towards those with accents or "foreign" names: these are all problems that already discourage APA's from voting, and these problems will only be exacerbated once these laws go into effect.

At a time when only a third of eligible APA voters participate in elections, elected officials should be doing everything they can to encourage our greater participation in our democracy, not pass unnecessary and expensive measures that will only further depress voter turnout. What's worse, these machinations prevent community activists from naturalizing more of our immigrants, registering first time voters, and organizing and fighting for undocumented community members to become legalized and be given a path to citizenship.

Our collective voices at the ballot box are already suppressed by structural problems, and the GOP 2012 voter suppression efforts are adding fuel to the fire.  Most of the time, these efforts are clearly aimed towards Latino or African-American voters, and APA's are caught in the crosshairs, ignored, like always, in the national conversation. In other localities, APA voters are also being explicitly targeted by such legislation. In any case, these efforts pose a grave threat to our voter turnout in 2012 and beyond.

Photo Courtesy of MDYOUNGDEMS.com

About me: Hey, I'm Dayne, and I'm a recent graduate of Pomona College. In college, I was active in AAPI student organizing as well as community work. I'm currently based out of Washington, D.C., and I'll be posting two to three times a week with the latest in progressive and AAPI political news and policy analysis, as well as spotlight features on young community leaders. Leave comments and share with friends! Follow me on twitter @ dayne4progress