Reply #50: Have you seen the PFAW "Voter ID" report, "The New Face of Jim Crow?"

[ProgressiveEconomist]

It's summarized at http://www.pfaw.org/go/VoterSuppression with a download link for the full PDF text. Here's an excerpt from the summary page:

"The New Face of Jim Crow: Voter Suppression in America

Introduction

'I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.'

--Radical Right strategist Paul Weyrich, at a 1979 training session for 15,000 conservative preachers in Dallas.

There are two ways to win an election. One is to get a majority of voters to support you. The other is to prevent voters who oppose you from casting their votes. In the 27 years since Paul Weyrich's astonishingly candid admission, the radical right wing in America has developed an array of subtle and overt methods to suppress voter registration and turnout. The methods are targeted to constituencies most likely to oppose right-wing causes and candidates: low-income families, minorities, senior citizens and citizens for whom English is a second language. ... voter suppression today is overwhelmingly achieved through regulatory, legislative and administrative means, resulting in modern-day equivalents of poll taxes and literacy tests that kept Black voters from the ballot box in the Jim Crow era.

Couched in feel-good phrases such as 'voter security' and 'anti-voter fraud,' these measures limit voter registration, turn voters away from polling places, and cast doubt on the validity of ballots. For example, stringent voter ID rules that require photo ID at the polls sound reasonable, until the estimated up to 12 percent of eligible voters who do not have a driver�s license are figured in. ..."