I've yet to hear a reasonable argument that enacting new requirements for voting accomplishes its defenders stated goal of safeguarding elections from voter fraud. This seems to be the case because voter fraud, statistically speaking, doesn't even qualify as a rounding error. From Monday's NYT:
After all the allegations of rampant voter fraud and claims that millions had voted illegally, the people who supervised the general election last month in states around the nation have been adding up how many credible reports of fraud they actually received. The overwhelming consensus: next to none.An expert uses the L-word (emphasis mine):
And they underscore what researchers and scholars have said for years: Fraud by voters casting ballots illegally is a minuscule problem, but a potent political weapon.
“The old notion that somehow there are all these impostors out there, people not eligible to vote that are voting — it’s a lie,” said Thomas E. Mann, a resident scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. “But it’s what’s being used in the states now to impose increased qualifications and restrictions on voting.”This is a systemic effort to deny certain citizens their right to vote because they're more likely to vote Democratic.
A cursory reading of history shows our democratic experiment has a rich history of first denying citizenship, then denying citizens the ballot. Ergo the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments.
We've changed the laws, but changing the norm -- that all citizens can and should vote -- has taken much longer. It seems clear, too, that we haven't made as much progress as we'd like to think.
I struggle to think of anything less American than denying Americans the vote.
When a significant number of voters and officials think otherwise, at what point do our institutions lose the legitimacy of being democratically elected?
How much damage can the norm of "one person, one vote" take?
If our institutions aren't democratic, what sort of government do we have?
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Update -- 12/30/2016
Judge blocks law limiting incoming #NorthCarolina governor's power https://t.co/utHaajxPYV #RoyCooper pic.twitter.com/SMNGW2LqKE— Reuters Legal (@ReutersLegal) December 30, 2016
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