Partisans who mess with voters’ rights are playing with fire
April 9, 2009
St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial Board
Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan published a detailed report last week saying that Missouri voters generally fared well at the polls last November.
That was no accident. Despite huge turnouts, troubles were few at state polling places, the result of good preparation by election officials, voting rights advocates, voters themselves and more than 24,000 volunteers — real patriots at work.
So here’s a system that worked and could be improved only by allowing Missourians to vote early, as voters in 32 other states can do. Naturally, Republican lawmakers in the Missouri House of Representatives have decided to mess up a good idea with a bad one.
On a pure party-line vote Tuesday, the House Elections Committee approved a proposed constitutional amendment that would allow early voting, but only at the cost of disenfranchising many voters and locking Missouri into one of the least progressive voting systems in the nation.
Missouri voters would benefit immensely from an early voting system. But state lawmakers have shown little interest in their constituents’ convenience. They do a lot of talking about it, but they consistently have failed to take action.
Now House Republicans are holding early voting hostage. They are proposing a constitutional amendment that provides early voting, but through the stingiest program imaginable.
Under their plan, embodied in House Joint Resolution 9, early voting would be available just for one week and for limited hours. Other states allow early voting to last at least two weeks and accommodate working people with extended hours.
HJR 9 would let counties open one early voting center. Those that wanted more than one would would receive no state support.
That’s not all. To gain even this second-class system, Missouri voters would have to swallow an amendment to HJR 9 requiring mandatory photo identification at polling places. House Republicans cynically cobbled together the two concepts into one proposal — all without a public hearing.
The photo ID requirement is a vestige of GOP political guru Karl Rove’s voter suppression efforts during President George W. Bush’s administration. A voter ID requirement passed in Missouri in 2006, but was thrown out by the Missouri Supreme Court. Subsequently, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld — wrongly, in our view — a similar law in Indiana.
Photo ID is billed as a way to stem fraud, but that’s a phony argument. There wasn’t a single complaint of voter impersonation in Missouri in the last election cycle.
The effect would be to disenfranchise some of the more than 200,000 Missourians who lack photo IDs, many of them elderly or poor — people who tend to vote Democratic.
And it would penalize voters who need special assistance. Permanently disabled voters, for example, now can be granted permanent absentee voter status. HJR 9 provides no such allowance.
Constitutions should be amended infrequently and with care. This amendment was proposed simply to circumvent a gubernatorial veto.
As much as we favor early voting, we can’t swallow the poison pill that is the voter ID requirement. The House should reject the committee bill. Failing that, the Senate should reject it.
Citizens are way ahead of politicians when it comes to voting rights. They’ve lived through Bush v. Gore, long lines at polling place, scare tactics and dirty tricks on Election Day. They have had enough. They have every reason to resent this cynical partisanship. Partisans who mess with voters’ rights are playing with fire — and deserve to get burned.
0 comments:
Post a Comment