Millions of Hispanics May Not Be Able to Fulfill Constitutional Obligation on Nov. 6

According to a report published on Monday by Advancement Project, a civil rights group, several million Hispanic voters could be discouraged from voting on Nov. 6 to elect the new president of the United States because of laws that will make accessing ballot boxes more difficult in about twenty states.

Insofar as Americans of Hispanic origin, the largest minority, account for ten percent of the people of voting age in the United States, those measures could end up being critical in key states with a significant Hispanic population, such as Florida.

According to Advancement Project, 23 states recently set up various obstructions which could prevent Hispanic citizens from voting, in particular for the renewal of electoral rolls, as they would be required to show a photo ID and to provide evidence of citizenship. “Today we are witnessing the greatest assault on voting rights in over a century,” Penda Hair, co-founder of Advancement Project, told the press regretfully.

According to this organization, these roadblocks could prevent over ten million Hispanic citizens from registering on the electoral roll and voting in 2012, which is half of the 21 million Hispanics eligible to vote.

In addition, polls show that the Hispanic population supports Barack Obama twice as much as it supports his rival Mitt Romney. Criticism has been raised regarding the implementation of restrictions in certain states that would be designed to erode the democratic vote by excluding minorities. “Like African Americans, Latinos have experienced decreased access [to electoral rolls] and correspondingly lower levels of voter registration and participation than non-Hispanic whites,” the report points out.

According to the 2010 census, nearly 30 percent of the Hispanic voters were not registered, versus 18 percent for non-Hispanic whites, and over half of them admitted they were not going to vote, versus 38 percent of Caucasians.

However, some of those restrictive laws are being repealed by justice: federal judges invalidated one of them in Texas at the end of August and on Monday a court in Washington completed the review of an appeal in South Carolina that requested the application of its law, which had been repealed by the Obama administration.