Dems aim to dismantle state voting restrictions

[Selatius]

18. See, this is how rights work: You can't vote on its existence.

If a state wants to pass a voter ID law, then the burden of ensuring everyone has an ID should be the state to pay. Typically, the legislatures that pass these laws don't set aside funding to identify people who have trouble getting IDs and helping them.

As a result, it is an unfunded mandate with the effect of keeping people away from the polls. There are Korean War veterans and a handful of World War II veterans as well as Viet Nam veterans who have probably lost their Social Security cards or birth certificates or both, and so they can't vote, in a nation that they fought and sacrificed for. There are elderly black citizens who lived in the days of Jim Crow, and so they never had much of a paper trail documenting their identity or even a birth certificate. Now they can't vote. There are millions of others who are in similar circumstance, and now they can't even vote.

Doing the popular thing isn't always the right thing. LBJ once opined that signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act was tantamount to committing political suicide for the party. He was right. A huge chunk of the working class vote splintered off and joined the Republican Party, and to date the Democrats have had trouble getting these voters back, but you know what? Signing the Civil Rights Act into law was the right thing to do, despite its unpopularity in those days.