When 7th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard A. Posner speaks, for better or for worse, lawyers, judges, and Supreme Court Justices listen. “Posner authored the Opinion in the decision of Crawford v Marion County, the 7th Circuit decision in 2008 that upheld Indiana’s “Voter ID” law.”
So it is significant that he now wants to revisit the issue:
“There is only one motivation for imposing burdens on voting that are ostensibly designed to discourage voter-impersonation fraud,” [Posner] writes, “and that is to discourage voting by persons likely to vote against the party responsible for imposing the burdens.” More specifically, he observes, photo ID laws are “highly correlated with a state’s having a Republican governor and Republican control of the legislature and appear to be aimed at limiting voting by minorities, particularly blacks.”
The non-too-liberal Supreme Court, whose first decision this fall made it harder to vote in Ohio, has blocked new voter ID law in Wisconsin.
As the Daily Kos put it:
It does seem a bit ridiculous, doesn’t it? That we still have to fight for voting rights, fight against laws that seek to suppress the vote, laws that will have a disproportionate impact on those Americans who—had they been of voting age before 1965—would likely have been barred because of their race? Ridiculous is one word for it. Infuriating is another. These tactics violate everything for which our country is supposed to stand. As President Obama put it, “The idea that you’d purposely try to prevent people from voting? un-American.”
I’m reminded that many of the post-Bill of Rights amendments to the US Constitution were designed to EXPAND the franchise, not limit it.
