Posted on 01/14/2008 9:52:57 PM PST by ricks_place
The Supreme Court heard arguments last week in a hugely important case about voter ID laws. Asking for identification at the polls may sound reasonable, but an Indiana law disenfranchises large numbers of people without driver’s licenses, especially poor and minority voters. If the court upholds the law, as appears likely, it will be a sad new chapter in its abandonment of voters, a group whose rights it once defended vigorously.
As long as there have been elections, there have been attempts to keep eligible people from voting. States and localities adopted poll taxes, literacy tests, “white primaries,” “malapportionment”— drawing district lines to give a small number of rural voters the same representation as a large number of urban voters — and restrictions on student voting. In recent decades, the Supreme Court has rejected all of them.
The court understood that the Constitution guaranteed a robust form of democracy and saw its clear value for the nation. During the tumultuous late-1960s, Chief Justice Earl Warren declared that most of the country’s problems could be solved through the political process if everyone “has the opportunity to participate on equal terms with everyone else and can share in electing representatives who will be representative of the entire community and not of some special interest.”
In recent years, however, with a conservative majority in place, the court has become increasingly hostile to voters. During the oral arguments in the Bush v. Gore case in 2000, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor showed disdain for voters who had trouble with Florida’s disastrous punch-card ballots. After insisting that the directions “couldn’t be clearer,” she suggested that the court ignore the ballots of voters who had failed to master the intricacies. That is precisely what it did, by a 5-4 vote.
Since Bush v. Gore, disdain for voters has become the norm....
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
This idiot can't seem to grasp that every person who fraudulently votes steals a vote from someone else.
This issue is so simple it's ridiculous. When will we read the arguments about how police asking for a driver's license is a gestapo tactic?
Typical NYSlimes cr*p: “oh, the poor victimized DEMOCRAT PARTY voters,”
Oh boo hoo hoo. It’s going to be a little more difficult for Dimocratz to utilize fraud to “win” elections. But, never fear, Hillary will find a way; after all, she won the primary in NH.
These people are at war with sanity.
I read the headline and the source and immediately knew it was good news.
Which decision in Bush v. Gore tossed out ballots?
At some point the SCOTUS is going to have to bring the “one man, one vote” jurisprudence into the picture on Voter ID justification. This may or may not be the case, or the time to do it, but at some point you must confront the enormous body of litigation that led to the overturning of various voting organization schemes that sought to disenfranchise blacks by diluting their votes. At that time the court forcefully stated that one person gets one vote, and not .9999765 votes after dilution by fraud via sloppy registration, loose or incorrect identification, incorrect tabulation or outright fraud. If this standard of 1.0000000 votes per person was right as a result in the voter civil rights cases, it seems like a good and virtuous standard to uphold in the voter ID cases.
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“...an Indiana law disenfranchises large numbers of people without driver’s licenses, especially poor and minority voters...”
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The above statement is an outright lie.
There is no proof that anyone, ANYONE, has been disenfranchised in Indiana by requiring them to show a picture ID to vote.
I see the Liberal Talking point “Conservative Supreme Court” being used..again....
The idea that the Govt does not have an interest in ensuring fair and accurate election is absurd.
What this article also misses is the old paradigm “Let them vote, the system may be inefficient, but it is inclusive” is a dying Dogma, as it should be.
nyt bio
ADAM COHEN, Assistant Editor
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/opinion/editorial-board.html
Adam Cohen is a lawyer and author, with a particular interest in legal issues, politics and technology. Before joining the Times editorial board in 2002, he was a senior writer at Time, where he wrote about the Supreme Court, Internet privacy and the Microsoft antitrust case, among other topics.
Prior to entering journalism, he was an education-reform lawyer, and a lawyer for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala. He is the author of “The Perfect Store: Inside eBay” and co-author of “American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley, His Battle for Chicago and the Nation.” A native of Manhattan, he is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, Harvard College and Harvard Law School.
the decision was 7 to 2, that what Igor/FLA Supremes attempted was unconstitutional. the 5 to 4 vote was on the remedy.
Then how come the petitioners (the liberals) can't identify even one person who has been disenfranchised?
There is no proof that anyone, ANYONE, has been disenfranchised in Indiana by requiring them to show a picture ID to vote.
This Indiana law needs to make its way into every state ASAP.
“Since Bush v. Gore, disdain for voters has become the norm.”
Oh, the NYT must mean the that army of Democrat Party lawyers that were high fiving one another when they got those overseas ballots disallowed. Mostly military. Not their kind of people.
I suspicion they know how many tens of thousands of illegal votes they'll loose if this take place
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