Voting rights vs. 'Whac-A-Mole' discrimination (Editorial Board USATODAY )
6:56 p.m. EDT August 28, 2013
What several states are engaged in is less about vote protection than vote suppression.
... Because an estimated 11% of eligible voters lack photo ID, states that impose the requirement should phase it in and ensure IDs are easy and cheap to get. But that's not what states typically do. A 2012 report from the Brennan Center for Justice found that ID offices are often far from where people live and open at inconvenient times. Within hours of the Supreme Court's ruling in June, Texas announced that it would impose a photo ID requirement that had originally been denied preclearance by a federal court. The Justice Department rightly announced last week that it would take legal action to block the law.
Purging voter rolls. Florida humiliated itself last year when Gov. Rick Scott declared that there were "an alarming number of non-citizens on the voter rolls" and announced an effort to purge them. The state produced a list of 182,000 potential non-citizen voters, which eventually dwindled to 2,600 and then to 198 and finally to fewer than 40, drawing widespread criticism that the effort was intended to intimidate legal voters, especially Hispanics. The Supreme Court's June ruling freed the state to resume the campaign.
Cutting back on early voting. As part of a package of plainly discriminatory voting restrictions, North Carolina cut its early voting from 17 days to 10, ostensibly to save money. Considering that 70% of blacks in the state voted early last year, according to the ACLU, the real motive isn't hard to deduce ...
Advocates of voter restrictions often justify them by saying it's an outrage when even one ineligible voter casts a vote. But it's even more outrageous when eligible voters are denied their most fundamental right ...
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/08/28/voting-restrictions-vote-suppression-editorials-debates/2725025/