January 7, 2008

Is this good for democracy?

Or another fix in search of a problem? Or is it creating more problems? Jeff Toobin suggests that the court will not fix this one:
As a general matter, in recent years the Court has been reluctant to find what is charged in this case: a violation of the constitutional guarantee of equal protection of the laws. (The notable exception, to belabor the issue, was for a plaintiff named George W. Bush.)

2 comments:

steves said...

I don't know much about the case law in this area. On the surface, it seems reasonable to require some kind of ID and it is far easier to register to vote now in my state than it was 10 or 20 years ago. How much easier does it have to be?

I see that Richard Posner was one of the judges on the case. He is probably one of the most well respected applellate judges in the country. I would be interested to see what his other comments were.

Streak said...

Perhaps. It sure seems as if Republicans want to make it harder to vote. In fact, they seem to also trumpet concerns about voter fraud, while the most recent concerns have come from them. We now know that Bush's people practiced "vote caging" where they sent registered letters to people and then removed them from voter's rolls if they didn't respond. Homeless people, students, and military people serving somewhere were purged by this. We know that Republicans supported Diebold and their hackable machines and have opposed efforts to clean that up.

Let's just put it this way. I will listen to the Republicans on voter issues if they clean up their own camp.