By  Dianne Anderson

Not taking any chances or wasting any time, civil rights advocates are already pumped up for the 2012 vote.

Royce Esters, founder of the National Association of Equal Justice in America, said his group is concentrating on new identification laws and how it will impact the Presidential election.

On January, 29, NAEJA is heading up a community panel and town hall to talk

about getting voters re-registered before they’re squeezed out of the voting process. Many won’t realize that they can’t vote until they reach the polls.

The event will be held at Lewis Metropolitan CME Church at 4900 South Western Avenue, Los Angeles starting at 3:00 p.m.

In the coming months, he said that the election depends on advocates counteracting the increased racism that he hasn’t seen in politics for decades.

Corporations like the Koch Brothers, the multi-billionaire owners of the nation’s second largest privately owned multi-industry company, have infused the Republican Party and the Tea Party with funding.

He said the past four years is reminiscent of post-reconstruction when the white corporations created the Ku Klux Klan against the Blacks because they were achieving so much.

“It’s a lot of racism,” he said. “They are trying to take this back to the states’ rights and Jim Crow era. We should boycott everything they produce,” he said.

For now, he’s pushing to get the word out to every corner of the community about voter rights, making sure that every one who can vote, gets out and votes.

A panel of political experts and community leaders will also come together around recent laws that could mean further disenfranchisement of people of color, voter apathy, and new registration strategies.

Fanya Baruti, a Long Beach organizer with a New Way of Life Re-entry Program, said he is very concerned about the negative impact of the recently passed AB 109. Inmates coming out will now be supervised by the probation department, not by parole. However, because they would normally be on parole, they cannot register to vote, he said.

On January 18, he’ll be in New Orleans for a national workshop to review how the new laws will impact voting rights of formerly incarcerated and convicted persons.

Baruti, also a guest panelist at the upcoming NAEJA event, will talk about voter registration problems as more prisoners are released under the recent California court ruling to alleviate prison overcrowding.

Over the years, A New Way of Life Reentry Project has set up chapters in several states, helping mobilize thousands of voters for the last presidential election. Going into this year’s elections, the program is set to do it all over again, and is committed to register a million new voters from the formerly incarcerated community.

But, he added that a lot of new people will be hitting the streets under the  inmate release program, and it may be hard to distinguish who can legally vote.

“We’re supposed to register a lot of people to vote so we have to be very careful because there is a penalty by law if you register someone who should not have been registered. You can be arrested and have to pay a fine,” he said.

For more information, contact NAEJA at (310)608-5878 or see www.anewwayoflife.org/