Ignorance breeds contempt.
I was stunned into eye-rolling disbelief and embarrassed silence the first time I heard a rumor about the Voting Rights Act of 1965. When I began writing columns a few years ago, I’d get e-mails from black people concerned about their voting rights. Some thought that when the Act expired, blacks would lose the right to vote.
This is what happens when people allow hysteria and race-baiting to override common sense.
The Fifteenth Amendment prevented states from denying citizens the right to vote based on race, and whites tried to keep them from voting by a variety of ill-conceived tricks. Such was the “grandfather clause.” One had to descend from citizens who had the right to vote, which meant, in most cases, former slaves and their descendants couldn’t vote. These clauses were unconstitutional, so declared the Supreme Court in Guinn v. United States.
There’s no greater motivation than determination. Some states continued to disenfranchise blacks by requiring literacy tests. As educating slaves was illegal, there was an educational lag between former slaves, their descendants, and everybody else. Literacy tests were a blatant and obvious attempt to further disenfranchise blacks, although it unintentionally did the same to illiterate whites. In the face of this resistance, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
There are no such things as absolute rights, at least not on this planet. Voting is a fundamental right, but like all others, it is subject to reasonable restrictions. You must be at least 18, for instance, and you’re required to register. According to the Sentencing Project, most states bar felons and ex-felons from voting. Prisoners in 48 states and DC can’t vote. (Picture a child rapist exercising his “fundamental right” to cast a ballot).
What’s the rationale for barring prisoners from voting? As I said, rights aren’t absolute, including freedom, and the government may legitimately deny criminals this right. Their freedom to travel, for example, is also restricted. (Sarcasm off) The Fourteenth Amendment allows for this denial “for participation in rebellion, or other crime…”
That laws denying felons and ex-felons the right to vote disproportionately impact blacks signifies a serious problem with rampant criminality, but as politicians are wont to do, it becomes a “discrimination” issue. Defining deviancy downward is the way of the world, human nature being what it is.
In that regard, requiring picture identification to vote is a reasonable requirement designed to curb voter fraud (votes by illegal aliens and dead people, for example) and shouldn’t be ignorantly compared to requiring people to pay high poll taxes. Even as I write this, however, black so-called leaders and politicians are doing just that. They’re comparing the Georgia law requiring voters to show state-issued identification before voting to disenfranchisement tactics. These educated men and women living in a free country whip up hysteria and racial resentment among people they know are too lazy to learn the truth for themselves.
And the vultures always fail to mention that residents with no driver’s license who can’t afford to pay for non-driver’s ID (cost is one of the “disenfranchisement” arguments) would receive one free of charge. 
The left-leaning Washington Post was so eager to put out a race-baiting voter story, it got the headline wrong. If you didn’t take time to read the story, you’d have been under the mistaken impression that Georgia had revived the unconstitutional poll tax.
There are legitimate reasons to require voters to show a state-issued picture ID, and such does not compare — it doesn’t even come close — to voter discrimination from back in the day. To claim otherwise is to treat blacks like newly-freed slaves, a perverse practice, but one that is financially and politically profitable.
Related posts:
- Voter ID Requirement Reminiscent of 1954, Says Black Politician
- Dreading Dred Scott
- Watch Out for Jim Crow
Sources
- Some provisions of Voting Rights Act expire in 2007
- Jurist — story on Georgia ID law
Update: Allan Wall, who just returned from a tour of duty in Iraq, sends a link to an article he wrote about Mexico’s voting system. By the way, Wall lives in Mexico legally.
Karen of Scottsdale blogs about her voter-ID voting experience in Arizona.
