260,000 people could be disenfranchised
My grandmother Sylvia moved from Brooklyn to Iowa when she was 89 years old. It was a culture shock, to say the least. When my mom took her to vote, she complained of the candidates, “There isn’t anybody who’s Jewish!”
I thought of my grandmother, who passed away in 2005 at 99, when the Iowa Legislature passed a strict voter-ID law today. She didn’t have a driver’s license because she never drove (she’d frequently walk two miles from her apartment to the grocery store). Her passport expired long ago. She never had a US birth certificate because she was born in Poland and fled the Holocaust. She used her Medicare card as identification. She didn’t possess any of the forms of government-issued photo identification that Iowa will soon require to vote.
The ACLU of Iowa reports that 11 percent of eligible Iowa voters—260,000 people—don’t have a driver’s license or non-operator ID, according to the US Census and the Iowa Department of Transportation, and could be disenfranchised by the bill. My grandmother, if she were still alive today, would have been one of them.
But maybe they have to because Iowa is full of people who vote eight times using aliases? Nope.
There were only 10 alleged cases of fraud out of 1.6 million votes cast in 2016 and no cases of voter impersonation that a voter-ID law might’ve stopped. The only conviction was a Trump supporter who voted twice because she thought the election was rigged and her first vote wouldn’t count.
But Iowa Republicans are justifying the move by saying there’s a perception that there’s a lot of voter fraud. That’s super fascinating, because where does the perception come from? Republicans who keep shouting about it!
The fact that Republicans are pointing to the mere “perception” of fraud as a reason to disenfranchise thousands of voters shows why Trump’s baseless assertions that millions are voting illegally is so damaging.
There will be more of these.
Pretty sure I saw, maybe a week ago, news about a Republican talk show host, former polit, in flyover land who, after yammering on voter fraud, cast a vote as his estranged wife — who found out when it was discovered that her vote was already registered, as she went to vote in person.
Funny how that works so often.
Sorry, no time to search, on my way to a meeting. Probably on wapo.
Perceptions’ and ‘opinions’ equal facts in the post-modern world. Didn’t B&W start out opposing this ‘fashionable nonsense?’
‘Speaking one’s truth,’ without caring if its actually, you know, TRUE. Being ‘confident’ and avoiding ‘low self-esteem.’ Look at the White House next time you hear this drivel.
It’s always possible that Trump considers any vote not cast for Trump is an illegal vote.
Bingo!
One of the first dystopian fiction novels I can remember reading was We by Eugene Zamiatin. It describes a highly regimented and uniform society with numbered people, life in unison, and a leader who is always re-elected unanimously. A resistance movement crops up, there are opposing votes, but the leader is again declared elected unanimously; the report said that to count those other votes would be like considering audience member coughing as part of a concert.