The Aug. 8 story “States’ voter ID laws in peril,” reprinted from Bloomberg News, about the Supreme Court striking down voter-ID laws in several states, including Texas and North Carolina, is worded to suggest that these laws were a good thing, protecting the process from people who would vote many, many times in each election. This kind of voter fraud just doesn’t happen. Instances of it in the past 100 years are in the single digits.
But voter suppression is an American tradition. As soon as the Supreme Court struck down the Voting Rights Act, states with predominately Republican legislatures enacted laws that worked against young voters, minorities, and African-Americans in particular. They narrowed the acceptable forms of ID for voting and for registration. In North Carolina, for instance, a student ID was not acceptable, but a gun permit was.
The Supreme Court came down on the side of fairness, on the side of “one person, one vote” and for this we can all be grateful.
