Sun Valley weekly's editorial slams "sanctimonious" GOP & ALEC's voter-suppression bills

[highplainsdem]

I'd never heard of the Idaho Mountain Express before seeing it turn up in a Google News search this morning. It's a Sun Valley paper and the largest weekly in Idaho.

And its editor isn't at all happy with what the Republicans and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) are doing.

http://www.mtexpress.com/index2.php?ID=2005136438

Friday, April 29, 2011
GOP legislatures legalize voting barriers to Democrats

-snipping an introductory paragraph about the outlawed poll taxes and literacy tests-

But wait. The modern GOP has come up with a new artifice: voter IDs to prevent citizens' showing up at the polls to commit fraud, even though voter fraud has never been a significant U.S. problem.

The most widespread fraud has been by election officials' rigging ballots and voting machines and denying voters a chance to exercise their rights by moving polling places unannounced or closing them early.

With large percentages of Democrat-voting low-income Americans, students and blacks without government-issued identification papers of any sort (21 million, according to the Brennan Center for Justice), the Republican laws are being branded the largest legislative effort to scale back voting rights in a century. Behind them is the business-financed American Legislative Exchange Council, which aims for slates of corporate-friendly, Republican elected state officials.

Republicans are sanctimonious. Ultraconservative Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback sniffed that his state's ID law is to "ensure the sanctity of the vote." Kansas has prosecuted one voter fraud case in six years. One estimate is that 620,000 Kansans lack government IDs to vote. Unleashed by an approval by the U.S. Supreme Court's conservative bloc of a 2008 Indiana voter ID law, 30 states are scrambling to impose ID laws (eight already have them). Idaho's is one of the least demanding. Voters without photo IDs can sign a "Personal Identification Affidavit" at the polling place.

-snip-

Emphasis added.

[NYC_SKP]

1. Rec. It occurs to me that the more evil governments become, the less likely the poor are to get IDs

Even now there are those who cannot or just don't want to become involved in the ID process.

It can be for many reasons, including wanting not to be traced for some charge or some debt.

Rich Americans don't have this fear, they can just buy their way out.

Thus we increasingly will find that only men and women of means will be sure to have IDs and those without will increasingly not.

x(

I fear nothing short of catastrophe will bring significant change to our government and our society.

:patriot:

[Ship of Fools]

2. I'm here in Kansas

and intend to go up to U of K next spring to help out -- let freshman know what they will need in order to vote.

I have a question, though: Are efforts underway to challenge these new laws? If so, is there somewhere to keep informed about how those efforts are going?

Thanks in advance