On Friday, the state Senate's Democratic caucus filed an official objection to the law with the Justice Department.
"This is just wrong," said state Sen. Gerald Malloy. "With all the problems we have in this state relating to the economy, and we end up having a partisan bill that would disenfranchise poor and primarily African-American voters -- this is not where we want our state to go."
Haley has insisted the law isn't meant to discriminate against any group and that showing a photo ID at the polls is common sense.
"If you can show a picture to buy Sudafed, if you can show a picture to get on an airplane, you should be able to show a picture to make sure that we do what is incredibly inherent in our freedoms and that is the ability to vote," Haley said.
That's a talking point that Democrats have been pushing back against in recent months.
"You wanna know something? Getting a video from Blockbuster is not a constitutional right. Getting liquor from the liquor store is not a constitutional right," Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI) said at at news conference on Capitol Hill in July.
And there's what Democrats across the country need to be responding with. Voting is a right under the Constitution, and Voter ID laws are designed by conservatives to put barriers in front of that right for certain groups, based on time and money constraints. The laws were passed to make voting more difficult and to reduce the number of people who have their vote count, period.
It doesn't get any simpler than that. We should be making voting easier to accomplish, so that more people can exercise their right to vote, not less. But Republicans do not believe that, and that's all you really need to know about the truth behind these laws.
Voting really is the most sacred duty a citizen can perform in our country, and doing so should be as painless as possible, not made more difficult in order to restrict it to the "right" people.
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