Why is this not valid? (hint: because poor people can get it)
Judge Aleta Trauger, in a ruling yesterday on the issue of library-issued photo IDs in Memphis, pointed out the absurdity of the GOP’s voter-disenfranchisement law passed in 2011, saying that it is “nonsensical that someone who holds an expired hunter’s license from another state qualifies but yet someone who holds a Memphis library card does not.”
While Judge Trauger was ultimately unable to find in favor of allowing the City of Memphis to go forward with their plan to make it easier for senior citizens and the poor to exercise their constitutional right to vote, she did recommend that lawmakers revisit the photo ID law which was designed to keep those people from being able to vote.
According to the Tennessean, Deputy AG Kleifelter said that “an injunction would cast a cloud of doubt over the entire vote in Memphis on Thursday, especially if courts were later to determine that library cards should not be accepted at the polls.”
How laughably absurd is that? Well over two thousand voters have already cast ballots in the wrong districts thanks to the incompetence of Republican election officials, but the cloud of doubt he is concerned about is whether or not legally registered voters were allowed to use a photo ID issued by the City of Memphis?
Its time the media and politicians stop buying into the farce that somehow this voter ID law is anything other than a poll tax designed to stop the poor and elderly from voting. The people we pay to administer our elections should be more concerned with ensuring those ballots are accurate, and less consumed with stopping legitimate voters from casting their ballots…unfortunately, they are not.
