Voter suppression laws are about far more than proper ID

I used to have a pretty good mind.

Sometimes lately, it doesn't seem either good or pretty.

For the last 15 years or so, the party of old white people has been working harder and harder to prevent anyone other than old white people from voting. Especially since the Supreme Court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act and set Southern states free to return to Jim Crow days.

North Carolina may be the best example.

With the stated goal of attacking in-person voter fraud, something seen only a little more frequently than flocks of passenger pigeons, the state legislature and the Republican governor passed a law doing everything other than putting Klansmen as poll watchers to limit African-American voting.

Which is where my no letter pretty or good mind comes in. I focused on the wrong part of the law and left myself open to arguments.

I said it was discriminatory to disallow many of the forms of identification used primarily by black people. And of course the response was, "Why are you against making people prove who they are in order to vote?"

The answer is I'm not.


The answer is that other parts of the law -- and ones like it in other states -- are far worse.

And some of those other states are far more blatant about it.

Take Alabama.

Please.

In the land of Bear Bryant, George Wallace and Forrest Gump, cards that serve as voter ID are available at the DMV. If that isn't punishment enough, the state legislature closed most DMV offices in heavily black areas.

Of course getting registered is only half the battle. Getting back to North Carolina as an example, the new law reduced the number of days for early voting and did away with the rule that polls stay open on election day as long as there are people waiting in line to vote.

Florida, sort of the Ur state of modern voter suppression, had a cute twist in 2000 in Miami-Dade and other high minority counties. When there are disputes about whether someone should be allowed to vote, majority white precincts had laptop computers to check the state database. Other precincts had pay telephones to call a line that always seemed to be busy.

Sound fair?

A lot of us who have never been poor or black take things for granted. Vote? Sure, I'll stop by on the way to work or the way home. No problem at all.

Well, when I lived in Los Angeles, I was aware there were people who don't have cars and had to ride buses an hour or two both morning and night to get to their jobs and then get home. Many of these same people know that if they show up late, they might lose their jobs.

That's a good argument for early voting, and some states have early voting days on Sundays, where busloads of people get in at their church and ride together to their precinct.

Surprisingly, those are people Religious Right Republicans want to keep away from the polls.

So you see, it isn't about proper ID at all.

It's really about keeping the wrong people from voting.

You know.

Democrats.