The Return of the Poll Tax
From the NYT editorial today: Georgia has passed new legislation mandating that voters present a government-issed photo ID (for most people, this means a state driver’s license), or they will not be allowed to vote. People who do not have driver’s licenses will have to purchase an ID card from the state for $20. In Georgia, people who don’t have driver’s licenses are disproportionately poor and black. This development should be setting off all our alarms - curtailment of basic rights in the name of “security”, disenfranchisement of blacks and the poor…so why am I just hearing about it today, from the New York Times?
Even though it’s the most disadvantaged people in Georgia who are being summarily cut out of the democratic process, the demographics hardly matter here; why should *anyone*, even that one eccentric white millionaire who doesn’t have a license because he has a driver, have to pay $20 for the “privilege” of voting?
Well, as the Supreme Court reminded us in Bush v. Gore, we don’t have a constitutional right to vote in this country:
Just months after the Alexander decision, a 5-4 Court majority in Bush v. Gore denied Florida citizens a right to ensure their votes were counted, saying “the individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote [for presidential electors].”
Now, I’ll grudgingly give some benefit of the doubt to the folks who dreamed up this legislation - it’s possible that they just didn’t think it through. Is it a good idea to make sure that voters are who they say they are? Mmmm…sure, not a bad idea. But the fact of the matter is that there have been only one or two cases of this sort of voter fraud in Georgia, whereas absentee ballots are rife with problems. If this were an honest attempt to make voting work better, the law might address the absentee ballots, which it does not. Like the explicit gerrymandering of the Texas redistricting, this is a bald move to improve republican odds by removing a category of voters.