Some self-described legal beagle has a piece in The Atlantic on "How to respond to an ubiquitous, and misleading, question about voting rights." His thesis is that you don't have a Right to board a plane, or to buy cough syrup (or presumably, to enter a federal building), so it's okey-dokey to require ID to do these things. But you have a Right to vote, and so efforts to require valid identification in order to cast a ballot are nothing more than an insidious effort by those damned Republicans to disenfranchise the poor, the elderly, and "minorities" (whatever they are) from exercising their God-given Rights.
Really?
Voter fraud isn't a cause for concern?
But if you cannot afford to drive, and thus don't need a driver's license, the idea of getting a photo identification is much more daunting. Since you don't drive, it's difficult to get to and from a government office to get your new photo identification. Maybe most of your friends and family don't drive, either. Or maybe you are too old or too ill to get behind the wheel. Or maybe you cannot get time off from your hourly job. Or maybe the cost of getting there, in terms of transportation fees and lost work hours, is prohibitive.
Really?
When I went to open a checking account, the bank wanted a photo ID. That was half a century ago. I was able to get on a bus, go to a state office, and get one. But lacking a bus service, is he really expecting us to believe that these people don't know someone with a car, or that they're too stupid to call a social services provider for a ride?
"Maybe most of your friends and family don't drive, either". Maybe that means that some of them do. Oh, let's just blow them off. For the sake of argument.
So he cites the storied ACLU:
Research shows that more than 21 million Americans do not have government-issued photo identification; a disproportionate number of these Americans are low-income, racial and ethnic minorities, and elderly. Voter ID laws have the potential to deny the right to vote to thousands of registered voters who do not have, and, in many instances, cannot obtain the limited identification states accept for voting. Many of these Americans cannot afford to pay for the required documents needed to secure a government-issued photo ID.
Research also shows that the ACLU is generally full of it.
The fact of the matter is that people who can't afford to pay have programs available to aid them if they want to acquire a valid ID. If folks somehow can't get one, they're unlikely to vote anyway, because they're lazy.
The guy's really honked off because the US Supreme Court nullified parts of the Voting Rights Act. It's because of the conservatives on the Supreme Court, those hateful haters!
In other words, it all comes down to politics: the guy isn't interested in responsibility, nor the concept of "one person, one vote"; that sort of thing tilts the scales against Democratics. Look at former Washington state governor Gregoire's last election: they had to keep "recounting" and "recounting" in a close race until they miraculously "found" a bunch of ballots that put her over the top by a slim margin.
And in Chicago, more dead people voted for Barack Obama than had ever occurred in the history of Chicago politics.
No, this argument has nothing to do with the Left's allegations that conservatives are out to keep people from exercising their Right to Vote; it's all about preserving their ability to stay in orifice by maximizing the number of ineligible voters - who always somehow end up voting Democrat. They are the party that founded the KKK, the ones that enacted Jim Crow laws, and then fashioned social programs geared specifically toward stuffing the folks they claim to champion into the projects, amid cycles of abject poverty and ignorance.
Democrats went nuts when approval was given for expansion at Chicago's O'Hare airport, because the new runway went through a nearby cemetery - disenfranchising hundreds of reliable Democrat voters.
