New Frontiers in Voter Suppression

I wish they would just admit it: the only way repugs can win elections is if the only people allowed to vote are rich, white, straight, conservative, xian men.

These two examples are from Texas, but don't think it's not happening to your precinct.

Juanita Jean:

The Texas Department of Public Safety – where you go to get an ID to vote if you don’t have a driver’s license – has a little surprise for you.

Oh goodie. So if you have a parking ticket fine you can’t afford to pay, you can’t vote?
Ain’t America grand!

Charles Pierce:

The Republican noise-making over IRS dumbassery always was a charlatan's game as far as creating a "scandal" out of the dumbassery went, but that wasn't the entire point of it anyway. The entire point of it was to paralyze -- or, at least, intimidate -- the IRS into granting tax exemptions to the people that the Republicans wanted to have them.

And that strategy has succeeded.

Billing itself as a voters' rights organization, True the Vote was involved in trying to clean up voter rolls in some states, in deterring fraud in Texas elections and in verifying signatures in the Wisconsin governor recall election. The group found out earlier this year it was part of a batch of hundreds of applications that the IRS had been delaying and subjecting to intrusive scrutiny, and it sued to force the agency to approve its application. The decision to approve the group's application does not end the matter, according to Cleta Mitchell, lead lawyer in the lawsuit. She said the IRS still needs to answer for the costs and damages that resulted from the three-year delay, and for probing for information that the IRS's own internal auditor says wasn't necessary to make a determination. "This lawsuit is about getting to the truth and we are not going to stop until we find out the answers to these and many other questions," Ms. Mitchell said.

Just thirty years ago in Kentucky, the only "voter ID" you needed to vote was your signature.  You signed the card when you registered - at which time you showed no identification at all, just wrote down your name and address - and when you arrived at the polling place on election day, all you had to do was sign next to your registration card signature.  If the signatures matched, you voted.

And no, there was no voter impersonation that any kind of voter ID would have prevented. There was plenty of election fraud through vote-buying, of course, and even ballot-stuffing, but nobody went polling place to polling place voting under somebody else's name.

You know why?  Because it's a stupid fucking way to try to steal an election.  It's expensive, complicated, time-consuming, labor-intensive and it doesn't work.

You know what does work? What's a cheap, easy, quick and effective way to steal an election?  Implement ridiculous ID requirements to intimidate your opponent's voters into not voting.  That works like a charm. Every time.