Well we have voter ID laws so that's that. Whether or not it was put in place to discourage voters of a certain party or not, they're in place now. 87% still vote.
If they intended to require Voter ID for fraud purposes but without suppressing voters they would have passed these laws to take effect 8-12 years in the future to allow plenty of time for folks to get their ID’s in order.
Instead they are generally rushed through within a year and a half of the next election.
So how does this disenfranchise voters? In Texas in 2015 for example a judge working the Voter ID lawsuit found about 4% of the voters in the state didn’t have the correct ID’s per the proposed law.
While the law called for “free” ID’s you had to provide other forms of ID like birth certificates to get the free ID.
The court found that this was difficult for several factors:
- If you were elderly
- If you were poor
- If you were rural
- If you were a minority
One example was of an elederly minority woman who had voted her entire life and would now be barred due to lack of ID. She was born by a midwife in a rural area of another state and lacked a formal birth certificate. To get it she would have had to travel from her retirement home to that state and argue in person for a new birth certificate.
Before they would give her a birth certificate she would need a copy of her marriage certificate from a third state which was lost after her husband died if I recall, to show her legal name change. That state was more than willing to provide a copy of the certificate if she had her birth certificate....
She and her daughter spent five months trying to resolve this and was unsuccessful.
Couple the impacts and timing of the law with legislators caught on record as saying these laws are to help them get re-elected and it’s obviously being done to restrict who votes.