(PA) Voter ID law should be abolished (Montgomery News editorial)
Saturday, August 31, 2013
... It’s plain that vote engineering is the real motive behind voter ID campaigns. In Pennsylvania at least, the people most likely to lack an approved ID card are the elderly, the poor, minorities and those who live in cities — all solid Democratic constituencies that tend to occupy urban concentrations east and west.
But the most loathsome aspect of suppressive voter ID efforts is the way they undermine a core right of American citizenship. The fact is simply this: If you’re an American citizen without a felony conviction, you have an unfettered right to vote, GOP-approved identification or not ...
... we’d say the right to vote occupies at least as lofty a perch as the right to a presumption of innocence. So it’s far better, in terms of free and fair elections on the widest possible scale, to let a few cases of fraud slip by if the only means to stop them is to nudge hundreds of thousands away from the polls.
Particularly when most of them tend to vote a certain way. Leave elections to the widest possible input from the electorate, and let ideas and characters win the day without subversion from politicians seeking to trade basic American rights for partisan advantage ...
http://www.montgomerynews.com/articles/2013/08/31/montgomery_life/opinion/doc521b866fdf7cb417152574.txt?viewmode=fullstory
= new reply since forum marked as read
