No doubt counting among my friends a real squirrel in addition to those I merely derisively dub as such is enough in itself now to make me an Old Coot, but if not, questions such as this make me wonder if I’m beginning to see the world more and more as a place Where It’s All Being Threatened With Slipping Away.
Not today, or at least, not in Indiana where, yes, having to prove conclusively you’re actually a citizen of the nation in which you wish to vote to direct its politics and laws has at least, for now, been decided to be not excessively a burden.
That this should even be an issue seems so odd to me, but then, we live in a world now where airline passengers tamely line up like stockyard inventory to endure creative indignities of physical inspection the inanimate cargo riding beneath them still doesn’t have to; where the leader of our southern neighbor laughs publicly about his family’s role in culturally and politically inseminating his northern economic host with a refugee ten per cent of his total population; so perhaps the Alice in Wonderland nature of the question itself is just part and parcel of the times.
Still, shouldn’t the fact that, in a time where the fastest growing segment of crime is identity theft, the Indiana case has even become an issue in law at all raise the caution that we may be in danger of losing the ability to make sense of these sorts of questions themselves? To paraphrase the cynic describing a people releasing the burden of its boundary aspirations like Ruprecht releasing his sphincters at the table, “What is a voter? What is a citizen? What is a nation? Thus ask the last men, and they blink.”
Or am I in fact just become an Old Coot?
I grew up in Southern Indiana. Indiana had the largest KKK population north of the Mason-Dixon line. They would have still had poll taxes then if they could. In all the commentary I have read it seems this was a very carefully worded law making it difficult to not uphold. To my knowledge no voter fraud has been reported in Indiana so this laws intent is pretty clear. Winning elections by disenfranchisement, while fighting for democracy in the Middle East. Think anyone will see the irony?
Steve
Steve, the goal of the law is indeed disenfranchisement, that is, to deny the franchise to those not yet qualified by right to hold and exercise it. Like me: when I was too poor to afford a vet, I successfully sutured a drain tube into the hematoma in my dog’s ear without anaesthesia and healed it and him; denying me access to an ER just because I’ve not completed med school, internship, and residency remains an intolerable burden of bitter disenfranchisement I live with every day. ;-)
Fortunately, the photo ID laws are far less onerous: you simply have to prove you are the qualified (age, citizenship, criminal status) voter you claim to be.
Indiana facilitates this by making the process not only free, but retroactively free:
Indiana provides IDs free of charge to the poor and allows voters who lack photo ID to cast a provisional ballot and then show up within 10 days at their county courthouse to produce identification or otherwise attest to their identity.
Stevens said these provisions also help reduce the burden on people who lack driver licenses.
that is, you don’t even have to have yet acquired your free voter ID to vote, you can get it later, after the fact.
Like I said, if the franchise doesn’t even have the inherent value anymore of requiring one to demonstrate one has the discriminative honor of exercising it, we all might as well just sit at the table and shit in our pants like Ruprecht. ;-)
Not quite as bad as I had heard. I bet it still cuts out some older folks. I could just hear my grandfather if he were still alive. “They know who I am and I have voted there for 60 years. I am not gonna go get any card”.
Steve