as if the inclusion of the word Carter is proof that what all the editorial boards of all the newspapers are referring to as suppression of low income, elderly and minority voters isn't so.
I guess Jody will volunteer to cruise the tenements with a caravan of buses and will personally be ferrying the IDless to obtain their FREE IDs after she ferrys them to obtain copies of their birth certificates.
Suppressing the Vote
With Election Day around the corner, and concerns about another voting debacle of Florida 2000-proportions running high (especially given problems at primaries this year in Maryland, Ohio, Illinois and several other states) – Republicans in Congress are on the job and doing everything they can to further disenfranchise voters.
Rather than taking the necessary steps to strengthen, expand and improve the democratic process, the GOP has launched a new effort to create modern-day Jim Crow exclusionary practices through new voter ID requirements.
The House recently passed a bill along party lines requiring voters to present a photo ID beginning in 2008. Starting in 2010, voters would need to pay for a government-issued proof of citizenship – a virtual poll tax. This shameful legislation was passed just months after the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act when President Bush declared "the right of ordinary men and women to determine their own political future."
"If the Bill passed the Senate and became law, the electorate would likely become more middle-aged, whiter and richer – and, its sponsors are anticipating, more Republican," the New York Times wrote in a recent editorial.
Demos, a national public policy organization, reports that the legislation would disproportionately impact people of color, individuals with disabilities, rural voters, people living on reservations, the homeless, and low-income people – all of whom studies show are less likely to carry a photo ID and more often have to change photo ID information.
The rest is at:
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut?bid=7&pid=125185 New York Times - September 21, 2006
Editorial: Keep Away the Vote
One of the cornerstones of the Republican Party’s strategy for winning elections these days is voter suppression, intentionally putting up barriers between eligible voters and the ballot box. The House of Representatives took a shameful step in this direction yesterday, voting largely along party lines for onerous new voter ID requirements. Laws of this kind are unconstitutional, as an array of courts have already held, and profoundly undemocratic. The Senate should not go along with this cynical, un-American electoral strategy.
The bill the House passed yesterday would require people to show photo ID to vote in 2008. Starting in 2010, that photo ID would have to be something like a passport, or an enhanced kind of driver’s license or non-driver’s identification, containing proof of citizenship. This is a level of identification that many Americans simply do not have.
The bill was sold as a means of deterring vote fraud, but that is a phony argument. There is no evidence that a significant number of people are showing up at the polls pretending to be other people, or that a significant number of noncitizens are voting.
Noncitizens, particularly undocumented ones, are so wary of getting into trouble with the law that it is hard to imagine them showing up in any numbers and trying to vote. The real threat of voter fraud on a large scale lies with electronic voting, a threat Congress has refused to do anything about.
The actual reason for this bill is the political calculus that certain kinds of people — the poor, minorities, disabled people and the elderly — are less likely to have valid ID. They are less likely to have cars, and therefore to have drivers’ licenses. There are ways for nondrivers to get special ID cards, but the bill’s supporters know that many people will not go to the effort if they don’t need them to drive.
If this bill passed the Senate and became law, the electorate would likely become more middle-aged, whiter and richer — and, its sponsors are anticipating, more Republican.
Court after court has held that voter ID laws of this kind are unconstitutional. This week, yet another judge in Georgia struck down that state’s voter ID law.
Last week, a judge in Missouri held its voter ID law to be unconstitutional. Supporters of the House bill are no doubt hoping that they may get lucky, and that the current conservative Supreme Court might uphold their plan.
America has a proud tradition of opening up the franchise to new groups, notably women and blacks, who were once denied it. It is disgraceful that, for partisan political reasons, some people are trying to reverse the tide, and standing in the way of people who have every right to vote.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/21/opinion/21thu1.html?_... Voter ID ploy stands on lame fraud claims
Published on: 09/24/06
Republican leaders have discovered a grave threat to American democracy that most of us apparently had not noticed: Everywhere, in big states and small, red enclaves and blue, bustling metropolises and rural hamlets, impostors are flocking to the polls to vote under false pretenses. Apparently, the nation has been overrun by fake voters.
snip
Yet, the lack of a problem has made Republicans no less insistent on a solution. It makes you wonder whether they are up to something other than ferreting out voter fraud. Even if there is a legitimate need for a single, government-sponsored identification card in an age of terrorism, it would take years — and a well-organized, government-funded effort — to place those IDs in the hands of every elderly and rural American in out-of-the-way towns and every American of color in down-at-the-heels urban neighborhoods.
Of course, Republicans know that. They also know that most minority voters tend to cast their ballots for Democrats; so do many low-income elderly voters. Since those voters are less likely to have driver's licenses, it's a safe bet that requiring a photo ID at the polls will shave off a few Democratic voters. As we've seen in the past two presidential elections, just a few votes can make a winner out of a loser.
The GOP has given up making its policies broadly appealing. Instead, it works hard at keeping a certain slice of voters from the polls.
Their focus on blocking the ballot box seems especially harsh — and hypocritical — at the very time that President Bush has claimed that spreading democratic ideals is the centerpiece of American foreign policy. How can we export democracy to Iraq if we are so uncomfortable with it here at home?
•Cynthia Tucker is editorial page editor. Her column runs Sundays and Wednesdays.
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/tucker/stories/2006/09/23/0924edtuck.html
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