The Republican war on voting actually serves two purposes. The most obvious is in preventing people from exercising their most fundamental right as an American, while the second is to create yet another culture war wedge issue. Hordes of illegal aliens
are voting, they argue -- without evidence. In other cases, people vote twice or in the wrong district, in order to elect their candidates. The problem with this scenario is that the one high-profile case I can think of involved
someone who would most definitely not vote dem. Still, it fosters the divisive "us-vs-them" hysteria that Republicans love so.
The
New York Times editorial board points out just how phantasmagorical the idea of widespread voter fraud really is.
In Kansas, the secretary of state, Kris Kobach (who also wrote Arizona’s notorious anti-immigrant law), pushed for an ID law on the basis of a list of 221 reported instances of voter fraud in Kansas since 1997. Even if that were true, it would be an infinitesimal percentage of the votes cast during that period, but it is not true.
When The Wichita Eagle looked into the local cases on the list, the newspaper found that almost all were honest mistakes: a parent trying to vote for a student away at college, or signatures on mail-in ballots that didn’t precisely match those on file. In one case of supposed “fraud,” a confused non-citizen was asked at the motor vehicles bureau whether she wanted to fill out a voter registration form, and did so not realizing she was ineligible to vote...[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
