Taking Your Right To Vote: The Return Of Jim Crow

I've been banging this drum for months now folks, and I'm not giving up on it.  GOP voter suppression efforts at the state level are the largest single threat we face to our democracy today, and the effort to sugarcoat these foul efforts as "Voter ID laws" has to be called what it is:  the new Jim Crow.  Take South Carolina, for instance.  The AP runs the numbers on the GOP effort in the state to limit traditionally Democratic voters, and finds out that's exactly what the law does.

The analysis shows that among the state’s 2,134 precincts there are 10 precincts where nearly all of the law’s affect falls on nonwhite voters who don’t have a state-issued driver’s license or ID card, a total of 1,977 voters.

The same holds true for white voters in a number of precincts, but the overall effect is much more spread out and involves fewer total voters: There are 44 precincts where only white voters are affected, or 1,831 people in all.

The precinct that votes at Benedict College’s campus center has 2,790 voters, including nine white voters. In that precinct, 1,343 of the precinct’s nonwhite voters lack state identification but only five white voters. They account for 48 percent of the precinct’s voters.

Benedict is not alone.

A precinct at South Carolina State University has 2,305 active voters, including 33 white voters. There, 800 nonwhite voters and 17 white voters there lack state IDs. More than third of the voters in the precinct lack state photo identification.

Mission accomplished, I'd say.  Once again, a major political party in the United States is running on a platform of making it more difficult for people to vote, specifically for the poor, the elderly, minority voters, and college students.  Once again, the kind of "voter fraud" that these laws supposedly stop, a "national crisis" has never been documented.  These laws exist for one reason: to tilt the electorate in favor of the Republican party.  Period.

No matter what you think about the Democrats, they're not the ones trying to take the right to vote away from people in order to try to maintain political power.