The Party of Lincoln and the Right to Vote
As the fight over a constitutional right shifts to a dubious South Carolina measure, the GOP doubles down on restrictive voting laws.
Aug 28 2012, 12:35 PM ET
Andrew Cohen
... Last week, you may recall, the civil rights battle centered on Ohio, where Republican officials were trying to defend their decision to cut early-voting hours leading up to the November election. The week before that, the fight for voting rights was in neighboring Pennsylvania, where Republican officials were trying to defend the virtues of a restrictive new voting law after their House Majority leader was caught on tape confessing that the new law "is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania." This week, the civil rights battle of our age comes home to the South -- to South Carolina.
The names, places, and disenfranchisement figures may be a little different, but the federal lawsuit styled South Carolina v. Holder is a familiar one. All over the country, in dozens of states, Republican lawmakers, fueled by the corporatist American Legislative Exchange Council, have enacted legislation aimed at curing voter fraud. No one has yet proven any measurable in-person voter fraud, mind you. But the politicians and bureaucrats supporting the new restrictions argue this doesn't matter; the mere possibility of future voter fraud is a good enough reason to burden voters.
Like Texas and Florida, South Carolina has sued the federal government to force the feds to permit the restrictive new law to take effect. Late last year, the DOJ's Civil Rights Division refused to grant "pre-clearance" to South Carolina because of concerns that the new law would impair minority voting rights. The Feds have the power to do this, for now anyway, under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act -- the statutory provision that was enacted in 1965 and subsequently reauthorized by George W. Bush but which now looks likely to be struck down this coming term by the United States Supreme Court ...
Today, in South Carolina, registered voters do not have to present a photo identification to vote. They can use their driver's license, if they have one, or a non-driver photo identification, if they have one, or a voter registration card combined with the voter's signature on the poll list. The new South Carolina law, enacted in 2011, would require voters to present one of five different kinds of photo identification -- and would require hundreds of thousands of registered voters in the Palmetto State (white and black) to get a new form of identification in order to have their votes counted this fall ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/08/the-party-of-lincoln-and-the-right-to-vote/261588/
= new reply since forum marked as read
