https://www.yahoo.com/news/voter-id-absentee-ballot-limits-090211630.html
Voter ID and absentee-ballot limits: the South tightens key voting laws ahead of election
When Michael McClanahan was growing up, his grandmother would tell him stories about what it was like to vote during the pre-Civil Rights era in their small town in northwest Louisiana.
Like a carnival game, white poll workers would ask Black voters to accurately count the number of jelly beans in a jar or pass other tests if they wanted to get their ballot, she told him.
“There was always intimidation if there was a big election,” McClanahan said. “She would talk about how the sheriff or the town police officers were there talking into the microphone trying to intimidate people.”
Those practices were outlawed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but new voting restrictions are being adopted in the South. And the new laws may alter the outcome of the 2024 election by lowering voting among Black Americans, who overwhelmingly choose Democrats.
Since 2020, states have tightened who can vote absentee and who can turn in absentee ballots. They've passed or stiffened voter identification laws. And, under pressure from Republicans who falsely claim the 2020 election was stolen through fraud, they're adjusting how they remove voters from the rolls.
That could affect which presidential candidate wins the swing states of Georgia and North Carolina, the outcome of key congressional and state legislative races, and which party’s candidate wins a seat on the Alabama court that upended fertility medicine.
McClanahan, president of the Louisiana state conference of the NAACP, said Jim Crow never left the state. Efforts to undefined were underway long before former Pesident DOnald Trump came into the picture, he said, but the misinformation surrounding the 2020 election provided a fresh opportunity
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