Monday, May 26, 2008
The Supreme Court - and Voter-ID
This case is really interesting.
It was apparently based on NO facts; but, even so, it got all the way to the Supreme Court, burning taxpayer dollars every step of the way.
On the positive side, it seems to put to rest a long standing misconception about the disenfranchisement of certain voters...
It was apparently based on NO facts; but, even so, it got all the way to the Supreme Court, burning taxpayer dollars every step of the way.
On the positive side, it seems to put to rest a long standing misconception about the disenfranchisement of certain voters...
At the NationalReview.com, Hans A. von Spakovsky writes:
"Justice Stevens, who came of age professionally in Chicago, where voter fraud has been endemic for decades, held that requiring voters to show ID is justified by the interest in deterring and detecting voter fraud and preserving public confidence in the election process. However, the critical editorials have repeated the same specious arguments made in both the Indiana and Georgia voter-ID cases — there are supposedly hundreds of thousands of voters who don’t have a photo ID (and can’t obtain one), and thus the turnout of voters (particularly minorities) will be diminished.
Unfortunately for the naysayers, the facts, as opposed to paranoid fantasies conjured up by lawyers and editorial writers, don’t support those claims. Both trial judges in the Indiana and Georgia cases rejected as incredible and utterly unreliable the claim that there were hundreds of thousands of voters without photo ID. In two years of litigation, lawyers were unable, as the Indiana judge noted, to introduce “evidence of a single, individual Indiana resident who will be unable to vote” as a result of the photo-ID law. In Georgia, the ACLU sent out a desperate e-mail asking their contacts to find an individual who could not vote because of the voter-ID requirement — but they could not find one. And none of the organizations like the NAACP that sued could produce a single member unable to vote. The Georgia court found that the failure to identify any such individuals was “particularly acute in light of Plaintiffs’ contention that a large number of Georgia voters lack acceptable Photo ID.”"
