Protecting the public or poll tax?
By Sibley Arnebeck
Posted on Tue May 06, 2008 at 04:44:42 PM EST
Will the Supreme Court's recent decision to uphold a facial challenge to Indiana's law requiring voters to present a picture ID before they vote have any effect on the vote today? And has the Supreme Court, the last line of defense in upholding individual rights, bought into the Republican's most successful voter suppression scheme?
The Toledo Blade editorialized yesterday that, "...the GOP's concocted argument that voter ID requirements are necessary to deter the possibility of voter fraud found a simpathetic audience among the justices."
Republican operatives through an organized strategy in 2005, helped Republican leaning state legislatures, as in Ohio, pass into law restrictive ID requirements. Although the Court, in this case, chose not to see this as a burden to certain minorities, the poor, students and elderly voters, others, including the plaintiffs, perceive it as a kind of "poll tax," that even if the ID were free, could cause other burdens (maybe not understood by those more fortunate).
This GOP strategy was based entirely on the bogus argument and continuing mantra of "voter fraud," where the fear was that someone might try and vote more than once, which is already a felony with a stiff penalty. Furthermore, there are no more than a handful of such cases ever successfully prosecuted. The real intent was to disenfranchise a whole class of vulnerable voters who normally vote Democratic.
Why would the Court choose this time to decide such a hot political issue? As Tova Wang, Common Cause's vice president for research said, "In a year in which millions of people have registered to vote in the presidential primaries, including thousands for Indiana's primary next week, it's disheartening to see the Supreme Court uphold a measure that will deter and prevent Americans from participating in the election process and having their votes count."
This most recent intrusion into our elections process also serves to remind us of the Court's interference in Florida in 2000. In Bush v. Gore the Court stopped the counting of the votes by the election officials, and exerting their supreme power, Bush was appointed and the will of the people was thwarted.
It is the role of the Supreme Court to protect the people from such excessive power, not to enable it.
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Tags: Supreme Court, ID, poll tax, voter suppression, voter fraud (all tags)
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