The Franchise

When I was 21 or so, I registered to vote.  There were nice people at a table across the street from my workplace signing up workers and shoppers.  I think there was a form to fill out.  I got a voter certificate in the mail and I believe I used that as ID when I visited Montréal later that year.

Mom, Dad, and I used to trot down to the polling place (later we drove because they were getting older) and vote on the old machines with levers (I believe the last time I took Mom to the polling place, they still had those old things) and occasionally schmooze with the poll workers.  My signature changed rather radically between 1971 and 1980, but no one ever questioned that because they knew me and they knew my parents.  And they only saw me once a year, if that.

When I moved to *ahem* the current location, there were voter registration forms on city buses and more people at tables, and when I'd lived there the requisite amount of time, I registered to vote.

I take voting very seriously.  I know my history, and I don't take suffrage for granted.  People died so that I could cast ballots.

That may be why the Republican efforts to restrict voting offend me.  It may be true that Jim Crow is not quite the correct analogy; the literacy test is closer.  (You've been spared a very old joke here.)  That, too, was supposed to be a way of cutting down on voter fraud, except it just happened to disenfranchise even literate voters if the right text was used.  Look at Ohio:

The low-income citizens of Ohio who cannot take time off work to get a photo ID, the elderly who are not able to stand for hours on end waiting for the gears of officialdom to grind out a photo ID -- these are voters who tend to vote Democratic. And of course that's precisely the point.

In the face of ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE that there is any kind of systemic problem with people who are ineligible to vote going to the polls, the Republicans are attempting to disenfranchise as many people as possible who might be unlikely to vote in their direction.

ETA: Daisy Deadhead reminded me in comments that South Carolina requires birth certificates to get state-issued photo IDs which are the only IDs valid for voting (which, as one of the comments notes, violates the 1965 Voting Rights Act):

178,000 South Carolinians without state-issued photo IDs will have their voting rights rescinded under the new law.

Papers, please?  We're pretty close to needing internal passports.  And the police seem a bit...trigger-happy...around minorities as it is.  One should not have to deal with the DMV, join the Army, or do the rigmarole for a passport to vote.

Via Brilliant at Breakfast.