The United States Student Association has filed a lawsuit in federal court aiming to overturn two procedures used in Michigan ostensibly aimed at preventing voter fraud. Michigan now cancels the voter registration of any person who is found to have obtained, or renewed, a driver’s license in other states. The obvious target of this rule are college students at universities in Michigan whose parents live out of state. The vast majority of these out-of-state students retain driver’s licenses from their home state. But many students have chosen to register to vote where they attend college.
Courts have ruled that college students have the right to vote in states where they attend college.
Also Michigan automatically removes voters when mail sent to an address on a voter identification card is returned as undeliverable. This procedure strips the voter registrations from many low-income people, a group who tends to move quite often. Voters assume that they are registered to vote, only to find out when they go to the polls on Election Day that their names have been purged from the voting rolls. (Click Here to Read More)
Most people think that every eligible black voter in the country will quite automatically flock to the polls to become part of a historic election of Barack Obama as the first African-American president of the United States. This is not so. Despite the excitement of a ticket headed by Obama, this year’s primaries revealed a huge reservoir of unregistered and non-voting blacks in the United States. A staggering amount of black voter apathy persists.
In the current 2008 election there may be no state where the black vote is more important than Michigan. With its 17 electoral votes, Michigan is the No.1 target in John McCain’s efforts to turn this historically blue state into a red state. President Bush came close to carrying Michigan in the 2004 election. Current polls show Obama with a slight lead in Michigan. But the race has narrowed within recent weeks so that Obama’s lead in some polls is within the margin of error. For Obama there is danger too in the fact that in recent years some counties in the northern part of the state have become increasingly Republican.
The Michigan vote is pivotal to the outcome of the national election. Without its 17 electoral votes, Obama will need to add Florida or Ohio and other smaller states won by Bush in 2004 in order to assemble the necessary 270 electoral votes required to win the presidency.
There are more than 1 million eligible black voters in Michigan. They make up 14 percent of the total electorate in the state. Black voters in Michigan are overwhelmingly Democrats. John Kerry took 94 percent of the black vote in Michigan in 2004.
But estimates are that there are at least 300,000 unregistered black voters in Michigan. A large majority of them live in the Detroit metropolitan area. Tens of thousands of additional blacks were registered to vote in Detroit in 2004 but they declined to cast a ballot.
Obama’s chances to carry the state of Michigan may turn on efforts to register this large reservoir of black voters and get them to the polls on Election Day. (Click Here to Read More)
There is no official Census data on the number of Muslim Americans living in the United States. Estimates range from 3 million to as many as 10 million.
But most analysts are confident that there are at least 400,000 Muslim Americans living in the state of Michigan. And it is estimated they may make up as much as 4 percent of the total electorate in the state. This is the largest presence of Muslims in any state in the nation. Muslims in Michigan include the nation’s largest pockets of Arab Americans, as well as followers of Islam from Pakistan, Iran, and Indonesia. There are also large numbers of Black Muslims — African Americans who have converted to Islam. (Click Here to Read More)
A consensus is developing that Mitt Romney will be John McCain’s choice for vice president of the United States.
For the Obama campaign, this is a matter for major concern. Why? A recent poll shows that a McCain-Romney ticket would quite easily carry the state of Michigan and its 17 electoral votes.
But with any other vice presidential nominee, McCain narrowly trails Obama in Michigan. (Click Here to Read More)
