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Proposed changes to voting laws in Florida have drawn a lawsuit by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The suit, filed yesterday, requests that Florida’s voting laws are reviewed by the Federal government under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. The controversial changes to the way Floridians may vote include decreasing the early voting period and restricting voter registration drives. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund believes people of color will be disproportionately disenfranchised. States across the nation are considering similar laws that will make voting more difficult, in one way or another. Those states include Maine, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin. In this month’s issue of Rolling Stone, journalist Ari Berman concludes the changes, “[t]aken together, … could significantly dampen the Democratic turn-out next year — perhaps enough to shift the outcome in favor of the GOP.” New laws include shortening early voting periods and prohibiting voters with a felony conviction in their past from ever voting. Berman found that come 2012, restrictive ID requirements at the polls may present the biggest barrier for the largest number of voters. Conservatives have argued for years that voter fraud is rampant, although numerous studies show fraud to be at negligible levels. Among the most egregious new ID standards passed is one Berman found in Texas, where a “concealed weapons permit is considered acceptable ID but a student ID is not.”

GUEST: Ari Berman is a contributing writer for The Nation magazine and an Investigative Journalism Fellow at The Nation Institute. He has written extensively about American politics, foreign policy and the intersection of money and politics. You’ll find his article, The GOP War on Voting in this month’s Rolling Stone. His book is called Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics

Read Ari Berman’s article here: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-gop-war-on-voting-20110830