WaPo: A vote against voting

[mod mom]

A vote against voting
By Editorial, Published: June 21
AFLURRY OF activity in state legislatures across the country is threatening to make it more difficult for people to vote. These Republican-sponsored measures move the nation in the wrong direction.

The bills generally take two forms: stringent new requirements for the kind of IDs voters must show and restrictions on early voting. Both would suppress turnout in a nation that already fails to turn out a majority of its eligible voting population.

Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon (D) recently vetoed his state’s ID bill, which he wrote would “disenfranchise certain classes of persons.” But Kansas, Alabama, South Carolina, Texas and Wisconsin have approved ID requirements. The argument in favor is that they will reduce election fraud, which proponents contend is a cancer afflicting the nation’s ballot boxes.

According to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, the accumulated rate of voter fraud in the few states with documented cases is tiny — amounting to overall rates of 0.0003 percent in Missouri, 0.0002 percent in New Jersey and 0.000009 percent in New York. That could hardly be defined as pervasive illegal activity among voters. In a recent interview, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) failed to cite one conviction resulting from some 221 allegations of fraud statewide.

-snip
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-vote-against-voting/2011/06/20/AG9es1eH_story.html?fb_ref=NetworkNews&fb_source=home_multiline

:mad:

[demodonkey]

1. If we as a nation truly had genuine concern for the integrity and security of our elections...

...all Direct Recording Electronic voting machines, especially all paperless ones, would long ago have been dumped on the trash heap of History.

There would be a voter-marked, voter-verified paper ballot for every vote in the USA and there would be significant and meaningful audits of every election.

Doesn't really matter who gets to vote (or not) if the votes aren't counted and counted accurately.

:grr: