70 Years ago: "I don't think being required to prove you're a literate citizen with a test is suppression of the will of the people"
If you look at the people affected it's clear that it is racial disenfranchisement under a different name.
If you look at the people affected it's clear that it is racial disenfranchisement under a different name.
Requiring IDs and then denying IDs to a particular race would be racial disenfranchisement. Simply requiring an ID isn't.
And in the end, I think it makes a lot of sense for an ID to be required in order to place a vote.
Because there are barriers, and expensive fees for many, intentional or not. The article above gives a couple stories of the issues people face trying to get ID for voting.
Until everyone can automatically and without cost obtain an ID for voting, these are new versions of poll taxes.
And yet, no politician campaigns for that because it would actually resolve the issue.
A politician who campaigns for that will be beset upon by the right wing as it heaves into a fit over they're spying on us, they're trying to track us. Because in actually solving the nonexistent problem, they threaten the true reason for the problem being posed.
But you decided to take only the slice of the problem that fit your talking point, and that is the real problem.
My "talking point", such as it is, is that one political party is actively disinterested in democracy (while the other is more or less ambivalent), and that nobody in that actively-disinterested party is going to let the ambivalent party make this happen. Because it empowers them for it to not happen. It's not rocket science.
Yes. The argument is pretty straightforward: explicitly mentioning race would be blatantly illegal, so legislators are targeting a variable that correlates with race and using that as a proxy instead. Old-school disenfranchisement laws did much the same thing, using the voting eligibility of one's grandfather as the condition for exemption from poll taxes, literacy tests, and so on (whence we get the term "grandfather clause").