A recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling should have reminded voters why it is crucial to choose your president with care. Just a week before Indiana’s primary, the nation’s high court – entirely staffed by presidential appointees – upheld Indiana’s voter identification law. The 6-3 vote count indicated that the court’s “liberal” justices increasingly are casting their votes with their conservative colleagues.
There is no way of knowing yet how many Indiana voters were turned away at the polls on Tuesday because they could not satisfy the new state requirement of showing state or federal identification bearing a photograph, though 12 nuns made international news when they were denied the right to vote. All in their 80s or 90s, none of them drives or gets out much. None had a need for a photo ID before the Indiana Legislature tacked this on as a requirement to vote.
These disenfranchised nuns are typical of one demographic most likely to be affected by voter ID rules: the very elderly. Low-income voters and African Americans also are disproportionately likely to be disenfranchised by voter ID requirements. Noting that these were the same demographics hit hardest by Republican cuts to Medicaid in Missouri in 2005, the Missouri Progressive Vote Coalition notes that it’s no surprise to find the Republican-dominated Missouri Legislature now planning to fast-track and strong-arm a new voter ID law in Missouri before the current legislative session closes on May 16. The bill passed in the House yesterday, 89-67, with a strict split along party lines.
If the Republicans succeed, some of Missouri’s most vulnerable voters would be faced with the requirement to get updated photo identification if they want to vote in November. Since the required paperwork (and transportation to acquire it) is not free, U.S. Rep. Wm. Lacy Clay has decried voter ID legislation as “a 21st century poll tax.” Even the U.S. Supreme Court acknowledged that there are no cases of voter fraud on record that would have been prevented by a voter ID law.
Since the people who will face this new “poll tax” if the Legislature passes this law are most likely to be Democrats, those who would like to keep another Republican out of the White House had better act fast. Missouri is a key, swing state, and Democrats will need every vote available to elect their likely presidential nominee Barack Obama and Jay Nixon to the highest seats in the nation and state.
Above all, they will need a very high black voter turnout and a very high percentage of the black vote if they hope to empower a Democrat to statewide office or the White House.
Democrats are outnumbered in the Missouri Legislature, so if the Republican majority is able to fast-track the vote in the Senate and get it to the Republican governor, Missouri will have a voter ID law on the books when voters go to the polls in November. Now is the time for the minority leadership in the state Senate to reach deep for all of its creativity in stalling the Republicans as they try to power their way toward disenfranchising old, poor and – most importantly, with an eye toward November – the Democrats’ most loyal voting bloc, African Americans.