June, 2012 archive

The Philadelpia Daily News catalogs some of the results:

TO THOSE who think it’s no big deal to require a photo ID to vote in Pennsylvania, meet Wilola Lee, 59; Gloria Cuttino, 64, and Nadine Marsh, 84, who all have voted regularly for decades. Each has been told by her native state — Georgia, South Carolina and Virginia, respectively — that there is no record of her birth. As a result, they can’t get the birth certificates required to get the photo IDs now required to continue voting.

If the new Pennsylvania voter ID law is allowed to take effect at the November election, these women won’t be able to vote. They and seven other Pennsylvania voters are the named plaintiffs in the suit filed against the law six weeks ago.

And then there’s New York native Joyce Block, 89, of Bucks County, who does possess the necessary birth certificate and a Social Security card — but in her maiden name. The only record she has of her marriage to Carl Block nearly 70 years ago is in Hebrew, which wasn’t enough to get her a voter ID until her state senator intervened.

At the Chicago Trib, Dennis Byrne has a long paean to Chicago’s history of vote early, vote often. He leaves out one crucial fact:

Historically, ballot boxes have been stuffed in the counting room, not in the voting room (and more recently, in the Supreme Court).

That’s why, historically, it’s called “election fraud,” not “voter fraud.”

“Voter fraud” is a PR term to gut out the vote.

Despite what you hear in the wingnutosphere, there is no chance that Sharia low could ever trumph U. S. civil and criminal law. So why the fuss, other than to stir up hate to be harvested for votes?

Steve Chapman sees parallels between the rightwing hysteria over Sharia law and times from our history.

In the 19th century, Catholicism was regarded by many people in this country as thoroughly incompatible with Americanism. They saw it as a hostile foreign element that would subvert democracy. Today, a majority of the justices on the Supreme Court are Catholic, and they are taken to be as American as Mountain Dew.

We’ve come a long way in religious tolerance. Or maybe not. The belief that Catholics are irredeemably alien and disloyal has given way to the fear that Muslims pose a mortal threat to our way of life.

That distrust is behind a push in state legislatures to forbid courts from applying Islamic Shariah law in any case.

In the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Tony Norman summarizes the history of attempts to restrict the franchise. He starts with the colonial period, in which only land-holders could vote, and works his way through poll taxes and literacy tests up to today. If you are unfamiliar with the history of the franchise, his article is a good three-minute cram course.

He reminds us:

Of course, these efforts were never couched in terms of disenfranchising whole classes and categories of people. In America, voter suppression is always about “ensuring the integrity of the ballot box.”

Of course, oh yes, certainly, yes-indeedy-do.