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Federal law already has voter identification requirements, such as verifying voters’ identities with signatures. The Republican scheme to limit voting on Election Day is shameful.
The 2008 presidential election was a stunning affirmation of the American electoral process, attaining the highest voter turnout (57 percent) since 1968.
Any doubt regarding the purely partisan motivations of the new voting impediments was erased in June of this year when Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Mike Turzai bragged to an audience that the state’s new and very strict voter ID law would “allow Gov. Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.”
Not coincidentally, the laws disproportionately burden exactly those groups, such as blacks and Latinos, who heavily supported Barack Obama in 2008. Judges have struck down several of these, but at least 13 states currently maintain restrictive voting mandates passed only in the last two years.
You may have heard of the case of Dorothy Cooper, a 96-year-old African-American woman in Tennessee, who produced a Social Security card, a voter registration card, a birth certificate and a lease, yet was denied the right to re-register until her story created a stir.
The right to vote should be sacred. We cannot justify barring potentially millions of legitimate votes by disingenuously advocating a hunt to weed out extremely rare cases of fraud. Our moral mission as a democracy should be to encourage all citizens to vote. We should be removing — not erecting — obstacles in the path to the voting booth.
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