Republicans don’t want most Americans to vote. It’s so obvious they don’t even try very hard to hide it anymore. It’s an obvious strategy for an unpopular minority party when propaganda and lies don’t work very well anymore. (Which was amply proven by their double losses in 2008 and 2012 to a black guy they accused of being a non-citizen, Muslim, and socialist who “pals around with terrorists.”) So they’ve ramped up their voter suppression efforts, which may now be the GOP’s main strategy for getting and keeping political power a majority of America’s citizens are unwilling to give them.
A Paul Krugman column in today’s Seattle Times puts this in perspective. Krugman wrote:
“[T]he political right has always been uncomfortable with democracy. … So what’s a plutocrat to do? One answer is propaganda …. Another answer, with a long tradition in the United States, is to make the most of racial and ethnic divisions …. A third answer is to make sure government programs fail …. But these strategies for protecting plutocrats from the mob are indirect and imperfect. The obvious answer is … [d]on’t let the bottom half, or maybe even the bottom 90 percent, vote.”
Enter photo ID, the GOP’s anti-voting weapon of choice, and a sneaky way of getting around Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, the 1966 Supreme Court decision that struck down poll taxes as unconstitutional in both federal and state elections.
Photo ID has nothing to do with preventing voting fraud. A journalism project that reviewed election records from all 50 states found only 10 provable cases of voter impersonation between 2000 and 2012 — an average of less than 1 per year nationwide. It is simply a plausible-sounding excuse for enacting laws whose real purpose is to prevent groups of voters thought to lean Democratic — the elderly, minorities, and students, among others — from voting.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/10/how-conservatives-justify-poll-taxes.html
The Texas voter ID law, enacted by a Republican legislature and signed into law by a Republican governor, illustrates the blatantly discriminatory nature of these laws: Texas accepts a permit to carry a concealed handgun as ID for voting, but not a college-issued student photo ID. But that state’s vote suppression efforts are more sinister than playing quirky ID games: An Austin woman claims that when she applied for a voter ID at a Texas Department of Public Safety office (why does Texas consider voting a public safety matter?), she was taken to an interrogation room where a state trooper extensively questioned her and then threatened to jail her.
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/texas-woman-threatened-jail-after-applying-voter-id
One way voter ID laws can be manipulated to disenfranchise targeted groups, such as the rural poor, is to locate state offices that issue voter IDs far away from where these people live and limit their business hours to make it difficult and expensive to go there to obtain the ID required to vote. For example, prior to the 2012 election, the ID office in Sauk City, Wisconsin, was open only on the fifth Wednesday of the month and that year only four months — February, May, August, and October — had five Wednesdays, which meant there were only four days in the entire year that people in that community could get voter IDs. (Wisconsin’s voter ID law, called Act 23, has been struck down by a federal judge and the Supreme Court this month refused to reinstate it in time for next month’s election.)
Charging for a voter ID is functionally a poll tax, and is still illegal under Harper, but there are ways to get around this. One way is to require a birth certificate, which costs money to obtain (and also can be inconvenient, difficult, and time-consuming) virtually everywhere. While the charge for a birth certificate may be only a few dollars, that can be enough to discourage elderly people on limited incomes and other people of limited means (such as the unemployed, working poor, and students) from voting.
But even more than the direct costs associated with obtaining voter ID, or even the cost of driving long distances to an ID office, the poor are burdened with the loss of wages from taking time off work to jump through the hoops of obtaining a voter ID. Many won’t do it, which is exactly what these ID laws are intended to achieve.
While Republican-style voter ID laws are obviously a substitute for the outlawed poll tax strategy, and preventing “voting fraud” is simply a ruse, don’t count on a Republican-controlled Supreme Court to strike them down. That’s unlikely, given how essential this strategy is for the GOP and its candidates.
For it should be equally obvious that a party which believed it could compete on ideas wouldn’t go to the enormous expense and trouble of implementing the GOP’s massive and highly organized nationwide voter suppression campaign. That’s the desperate tactic of a political party that knows it can’t win a fair and democratic election, but is determined the minority will rule over the majority anyway.