Politics

Planned Parenthood Announces Voter Registration Campaign

August 9th 2016

Prospective voters will soon be able to register at Planned Parenthood locations.

The campaign, announced Friday and titled “My Vote, My Voice," will allow people to register to vote at Planned Parenthood clinics, on college campuses, and online, the Huffington Post reports.

planned-parenthoodBigstock/Wolterk - bigstockphoto.com

The campaign's goal is to enfranchise marginalized communities and young voters.

“If we can’t all participate in our government, we all get cheated,” Planned Parenthood spokeswoman Anna Keene told the Huffington Post. “We’re launching the ‘My Vote, My Voice’ campaign to help ensure that every voice is heard and every vote is counted in communities across the country. No matter what your political beliefs are, if you don’t or can’t vote, then you can’t elect officials who will keep your best interests in mind.”

As part of the campaign, volunteers in 45 states will set up tables outside of Planned Parenthood clinics and on college campuses to educate people about voter ID laws, register them to vote, and remind them to show up to the polls in the weeks leading up to election day in November.

Line to VoteFlickr/Josh Thompson - flickr.com

Planned Parenthood serves about 2,840,000 patients per year, according to a 2014 report (PDF). Many of these patients are people from low-income communities disproportionately impacted by voter ID laws.

The campaign arrives alongside the 51st anniversary of the Voting Rights Act and shortly after voter ID laws were overturned in North Carolina, Wisconsin and Kansas.

The North Carolina law was overturned in a late July federal court decision that found it disproportionately impacted black voters who were likely to vote Democrat. In particular, the ruling stated that the law was specifically designed to disenfranchise black voters by requiring them to use the one type of identification they are less likely to carry than a white voter: a driver's license.

"Thus, in what comes as close to a smoking gun as we are likely to see in modern times, the State’s very justification for a challenged statute hinges explicitly on race — specifically its concern that African Americans, who had overwhelmingly voted for Democrats, had too much access to the franchise," the decision reads.

Though the initiative is technically nonpartisan, Democrats are likely to benefit from it because young voters and minority voters tend to go for Democratic candidates.

An August 4 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll reported that only 1 percent of black voters supported Trump. A McClatchy poll reported August 5 on the Washington Post found that Donald Trump was coming in fourth with voters under 30, behind Hillary Clinton as well as the Libertarian and Green Party candidates, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein.

As The Cut notes, The Planned Parenthood Action Fund endorsed Hillary Clinton in January.

[h/t Huffington Post]

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