Which minorities will be suppressed? Because I know the Supreme Court said if the ACLU and their cohorts could trot out even one "victim" of voter suppression, they could act to strike such laws.

sounds like democrats are not confident they can win an election if the people casting votes for them have to prove they are who they say they are. i would welcome voter id laws in kentucky if it ever happened.

Gotta love the dramatic words the dems will throw around.. It's a MONSTROSITY!! It's laughable really.

When the Governor that passed it can't actually name all the "valid" forms of ID that are acceptable, when he never actually prosecuted a case of voter fraud in his state when he served as the Attorney General, when the commonwealth secretary drastically underpredicted the number of people that would be effected by it, when nearly a million citizens of the state think they have a valid form of ID when they don't, when roughly 1/3rd of the state isn't even aware of new requirements, and when the state only had 3 weeks to rush all the information through: it's perfectly clear that this legislation is a monstrosity. It doesn't even solve the problem that it's alledgely supposed to solve, becuase we already know that voter IMPERSONATION isn't actually happening. The few random cases of voter fraud that has occured across the country over the last decade haven't been as a result of impersonation, but simply poor upkeep of voter rolls.

The words aren't dramatic, they're just a factual representation of the legislation. Though nicely done completely dodging the subject, I'll take that as an admission you don't actually know the ins and outs of the law.

...then you can't even write a check at your own bank where I live . An expired license is not a valid ID for anything here . It is not an oddity reserved for voting .

The point isn't that an expired license should be a valid form of ID, no one's arguing that. The point is that we haven't actually discovered a voter impersonation problem in the country that warrants the necessity of IDs to be used when voting so that people can't impersonate other people to vote. We've had national investigations, we've had state investigations, and we've had independent investigations: none of them have indicated widespread voter impersonation that's playing a significant role in elections. These results aren't even of a certain ideological persuasion. For every investigation done by a liberal-leaning institution like the Brennan Center, we have a Republican-controlled legislature sponsporing an investigation into voter fraud in their state with the money they were going to use to extend early-voting hours. The discrepencies we know of are: a felon trying to vote without filing the necessary paperwork after incarceration to reinstate their voting rights, someone voting early and then dying before election day, or someone casting a vote as a "Tom Scott Jr." when really they're "Tom Scott Sr." and the ballot administrator makes a mistake.

We could do much more to improve our voting system by modernizing the process and the voter rolls, and that wouldn't cause the massive suppression that was the clear intention of the Pennsylvania law. Pennsylvania, seeing what happened in Florida when 25% of the initial 1700 people that were notified that they were "illegally voting in elections" were able to prove they were legal citizens within a week, hasn't made the sufficient attempt to reach out to their electorate. They haven't spent the money to let the entire electorate know that there are new requirements, and they haven't made any effort to help people that fall in the cracks to get the documents they need to acquire a valid ID.

We've essentially reconstituted the poll tax by hitting select demographics with a "minor burden" as the judge puts it while giving a pass to others. If the shoe was on the other foot and the state handed down a law that all the financially capable white people ages 30-50 had to jump through hoops to satisfy arbitrary requirements, Republicans would be howling at the moon at the injustice. Until we can prove that people are impersonating others in order to alter election results then there should be no requirement to prove your identity when you go to vote. Do people really think that people are going to stand in 5 hour lines just to ATTEMPT to cast a vote in someone elses name?

This post was edited by JayKwik on Aug 15 2012 04:37pm

lol wat???
Only took a half hour for me last time.

This requirement really doesn't hurt anyone, there's no real reason to oppose it.

...in West Virginia the going price for a vote is half-pint of whiskey so I guess it all depends on what they are being offered to cast invalid votes .

Of course it does. It's disenfranchises elderly voters specifically. You don't have to look any farther than the fact that a sizeable subset of the most famous voters in the state of Pennsylvania currently are ineligble to vote in this election because of the new restrictions. While some of them have a couple of months to rectify that, if they've even been made aware of it, some of them have already resigned to the fact that they will be unable to vote simply because there is a problem with their birth certificate or that they've lost it altogether, as well as losing any need for their drivers license years ago, or not having the necessity to have a state-issued medical services card. The plantiff in the main civil case is a 93-year old woman that marched with Martin Luther King Jr. She's not going to be voting in the upcoming election because Republican-controlled state legislatures all across the country have forced through voter suppression legislation over the past 2 years so that it could specifically be imposed for the 2012 national election, and there's a problem with her birth certificate.

The requirement isn't based on any substantive need, there's no real reason to have it. When the state enters into testimony that they have no evidence of voter fraud, and they don't expect for it to occur in the election this year if the legislation was not in place, that's all you need to see to know that this is pointless at best, and illegal at worst.




I don't know what state you live in but strolling on down to the polls is just a 15 minute deal for everyone. We essentially had an election in 2004 that could have very well been decided simply because the lines in some counties in Ohio were upwards of 7-8 hours long and people couldn't wait it out. That's the whole reason we expanded early voting. Virginia was also a circus in 2008, but all of that is beside the point. Voter impersonation isn't happening.



Good dodge. Nicely done.

This post was edited by JayKwik on Aug 15 2012 05:03pm