Conservatives and Republicans are very emotional when it comes to politics, therefore they trust personal anecdotes over statistics. So here's a personal story for them, to show why new voter-ID laws being rammed through Republican state houses are bad:
Applewhite, a great-grandmother who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960s, has worked as a hotel maid for most of her adult life. She has never had a driver's license. Her purse was stolen four years ago along with her only copy of her Social Security card. She was adopted as a child and has been married twice. As a result, she does not have the necessary documentation to acquire a state-sanctioned voter ID card and if the law is upheld, Applewhite will not be able to vote in a presidential election for the first time since 1960, when she pulled the lever to vote for John F. Kennedy.
OK, and if you're an independent or Democrat, here are some stats for you from just one state:
Under Pennsylvania's harsh new voter ID law, as many as 20 percent of voters in the state lack the photo IDs required to cast a vote, an estimated 1,636,168. In Philadelphia alone, however, 437,237 people, a whopping 43 percent of the voting population, may be ineligible to vote under the law.
If Pennsylvania is like other many other states, it could take weeks or even months to get a state-sanctioned photo ID, even if you follow all the procedures punctiliously.
Nationwide, "11 percent of eligible American voters lack such ID. Poor, minority, and elderly voters are especially likely to fall into that group: 25 percent of African-Americans, 16 percent of Hispanics, and 18 percent of Americans over 65 don't have the necessary identification."
Without a preceding drive to inform people about coming changes and help them obtain free picture IDs, these new state laws can be interpreted only one way: a cynical ambush timed for November 2012 on the most basic right we have in our republican democracy, the right to vote.
If Republicans were serious about picture IDs then they would spend the time and budget resources to institute a national ID card. Gee whiz, by 2017 every Mexican under the age of 17 will be given a biometric ID card. Can't we do as well as them? (And then we wouldn't have to worry about non-current addresses, misspelled names, expired licenses, and other silly obstacles to voting.)
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