Voter ID Won't Stop This Fraud, Either

The only "vote fraud" that demanding special ID to vote prevents is people too poor to afford that ID from voting.

A former Ohio poll worker today was sentenced to five years in prison for voting illegally on behalf of other people, including a comatose relative.

Meanwhile, the effort to restore voting rights in this country is fast getting nowhere against obstruction from Mitch McConnell and other congressional repugs.

Ari Berman at The Nation:

The Senate Judiciary Committee held its first hearing today on the Voting Rights Act since the Supreme Court gutted the landmark civil rights law last month. The key witnesses were civil rights icon Representative John Lewis and Representative James Sensenbrenner, the former chair of the House Judiciary Committee who led the effort to overwhelmingly reauthorize the VRA in 2006.

In his testimony, Lewis described how he almost died fighting for the right to vote in 1965 and how friends of his never made it out of Mississippi alive. “I remember these problems and this struggle like it was yesterday,” Lewis said. He noted the “deliberate and systematic” attempt to make it harder for voters to participate in the last election, when nineteen states passed twenty-five new voting restrictions, saying “the Voting Rights Act is needed now like never before.”

There's an elected official in Kentucky who's in charge of setting voting rules and ensuring election integrity in the Commonwealth, and she's actually running for McConnell's U.S. Senate seat.  I wonder what she thinks about the effort to restore the Voting Rights Act and to stop voter suppression efforts nationwide.

 

Alison Lundergan Grimes? What do you say?

 

Alison?

 

Anybody home?