(WaPo) — President Obama’s reelection campaign launched a national drive Friday to counter new restrictive voter-access laws, which advisers said threaten his electoral chances in November.
Organizers will fan out in key swing states this weekend to teach volunteers and voters how to navigate a series of laws passed by Republican-controlled state legislatures imposing stricter identification requirements, limiting early voting and making it harder to organize voter-registration drives.
It is the beginning of a months-long effort, campaign officials said, to combat what they described as a Republican effort to stifle voting among young people and minorities, two groups that traditionally tend to vote Democratic. . . .
The Obama campaign’s “weekend of action” is part of a field effort that in 2008 helped identify, register and turn out millions of new voters. Those new voters gave Obama wins in unlikely places, including North Carolina and Virginia, where young and minority voters helped make the difference. Turning out those voters again this year is key to the president’s reelection strategy, but it is also more challenging this year in part because of the new voting laws.
“Over the past century, we expanded this fundamental right, making sure no one’s race, gender or economic status is ever used to deny this fundamental right,” said campaign strategist Michael Blake in a call with reporters Friday afternoon. “Unfortunately,” he added, “Republican-controlled legislatures in many states have been taking us backward, not forward.”. . .
According to Project Vote, a voting-rights advocacy group, about 15,000 people voted without identification in Virginia in 2008.
A centerpiece of Obama’s new effort is a Web site, www.gottavote.org, that helps voters register and understand the voting requirements in their state. The site — and its Spanish-language version, votemostodos.org — also urges viewers to sign up to volunteer and solicits lawyers to help with voter-protection efforts.
The campaign will hold hundreds of events in key battlegrounds Saturday and Sunday. In the Washington region, mostly in the Virginia suburbs, there were 38 voter-registration events scheduled between Friday and Sunday.
A particular emphasis will be placed on training volunteers who will be deployed through the summer and fall to continue the education and registration effort directly with voters.
Posted by WM @ Weasel Zippers on Saturday, May 19, 2012, at 5:05 pm
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