The
GOP’s crime against voters
Spare us any more hooey about
“preventing fraud” and “protecting the integrity of the ballot box.” The
Republican-led crusade for voter ID laws has been revealed as a cynical ploy to
disenfranchise as many likely Democratic voters as possible, with poor people
and minorities the main targets.
Recent developments in
Pennsylvania — one of more than a dozen states where voting rights are under
siege — should be enough to erase any lingering doubt: The GOP is trying to
pull off an unconscionable crime.
Late
last month, the majority leader of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives,
Mike Turzai, was addressing a meeting of the Republican State Committee. He
must have felt at ease among friends because he spoke a bit too frankly.
Ticking off a list of recent accomplishments by the GOP-controlled
Legislature, he mentioned the new law forcing voters to show a photo ID at the
polls. Said Turzai, with more
than a hint of triumph: “Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win
the state of Pennsylvania — done...”
Prodded
by GOP political activists, the Justice Department under Bush conducted an
extensive, nationwide, five-year probe of voter fraud — and ended up convicting
a grand total of 86 individuals, according to a 2007 New York Times report.
Most of the cases involved felons or immigrants who may not have known they
were ineligible to vote.
The
Pennsylvania law and others like it are under attack in the courts; this week,
a federal three-judge panel in Washington is hearing arguments on Texas’s
year-old law, with a ruling expected next month. Meanwhile, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder,
a conservative Republican, broke with orthodoxy last week and vetoed bills that
would have toughened an existing voter ID statute. Maybe the tide is turning.
If it doesn’t, these laws will potentially disenfranchise or discourage
millions of qualified voters.
In a previous column, I
wrote that voter ID was a solution in search of a problem. I was wrong: The
problem seems to be that too many of the wrong kind of voters — low-income,
urban, African American, Hispanic — are showing up at the polls. Republican
candidates have been vowing to “take back” the country. Now we know how.
Robinson might have ended his column, “Now we know how and
why!”
Cassi Creek: Utah has previously passed a resolution
opposing the “Real ID card legislation passed and signed in 2005. Reasons for opposing REAL ID include the
intrusive nature of the law. Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota,Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia,
and Washington have joined Maine and Utah in passing legislation opposing Real
ID.[52][53][54][55][56][57]
Similar resolutions
are pending in Alaska, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Mexico, New
York, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Texas, Utah, Vermont,Washington, D.C., West Virginia, Wisconsin,
and Wyoming
Note that Texas, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and other states
have since passed laws that demand all voters have a state-approved/issued
photo ID in order to be allowed to vote.
The bulk of
objections to the REAl ID card came from the political right, claiming that
despite the Homeland Security concerns, the card was un-necessary and
politically intrusive.
I find myself
in agreement with Mr. Robinson. It is
easy to see that the minority voters are far less likely to vote for Romney
than are the white voters who either see for their selves, or who have been
told, repeatedly and loudly, by the teavangelists, that the role of whites as
the linear successors of the old South is rapidly becoming only a memory.
I’ve always found
the teavangelists demanding “our country back” to smack of racism,
anti-Semitism, and other hate mongering.
One has to wonder, given the failures in court to prevent the
construction of a mosque in Murfreesboro, if there is going to be a return to
the violence of the 1960s.
It seems to
be fairly easy to push a bill through GOP dominated state legislatures that can
limit the access of minority voters to the polls. It may require a huge effort on the part of
minority citizens to thwart this legislated return to wholesale denial of the
franchise to those minorities. Church
busses and personal vehicles can be pressed into service in order to ferry
those voters with no drivers’ license to the most accessible point where the
approve photo ID card can be obtained.
People organized in such a manner all over the nation to help others register to vote in opposition
to the wishes of the white majority. Now
it may be the necessary tool to pry the reigns of legislative power from the
shaking hands of a demographic that is changing, losing its tight control to a
pair of minorities that have been excluded and abused at every opportunity. The aging white southern population appears
to be afraid of the potential African-American/Latino coalition. Such a coalition would have the necessary
numbers to seize and hold legislative power.
Together they must strike fear in the teavangelist/GOP base. That potential coalition is “who we want to
take our country back from.” Blocking
the ballot box one last time is “how” they plan to “take our country back.”
I don’t know
anyone who has been purged or excluded from the voter pool. Neither do I know of any factual instances of
voter fraud. Like the Communists still
waiting to overthrow the U.S., the myth of voter fraud is intended to scare the
people who lack any awareness of history and science. Because they can’t tell fact from myth, it
does scare them. I'm voting for the side of truth, ethics, and eventual American justice.
No comments:
Post a Comment