TX GOP Photo ID Voter Suppression Working as Hoped, Keeping (Dem) Voters From Voting

[99th_Monkey]

TX GOP Photo ID Voter Suppression Working as Hoped, Keeping (Certain) Voters From Voting
By BRAD FRIEDMAN on 11/1/2014, 6:38pm PT * BradBlog

Congratulations, Texas Republicans! Mission accomplished! Ya'll kept this guy from being able to cast his vote this year!...



The TX GOP has also kept a 93-year old veteran from being able to vote (because, ya know, fuck him and his "freedom&quot along with a whole bunch of others this year that we'll get to in a moment, thanks to their new polling place Photo ID law which was found to be both "purposefully discriminatory" and an "unconstitutional poll tax".

Unfortunately, despite the U.S. District Court judge's well-documented findings after a year-long trial process, the U.S. Supreme Court is allowing the law to be implemented this year anyway. Their apparent reason: the lower court struck down the law due to illegalities and unconstitutionalites of the Photo ID scheme, but that determination happened just too close to this year's elections to be allowed to stand this year.

But that 93-year old vet and the man pictured above, Eric Lyndell Kennie, are hardly the only ones losing their right to vote in the Lone Star State election this year due to the Republican voter suppression scheme. The unconstitutional law, for now, replaces the state's previous Voter ID law which had already required every single voter to present an ID at the polls before voting. That's right, that was already the law since 2003, and during the trial, state Republicans were only able to demonstrate two cases of polling place impersonation over the past decade out of 20 million votes cast in the same period.

Nonetheless, with the new, much more draconian version of the law threatening some 600,000 legally registered voters who do not have the new type of ID required to vote, all sorts of disenfranchisement is already underway.

Let's start with Kennie's story, since it's both amazing and heart-breaking, even if, we fear, not particularly unusual right about now...
MORE: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=10912

[randys1]

1. You will NOT vote , got it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If I am the only one who is so angry I am shaking, nothing will change

[nc4bo]

2. If you can't afford the price to vote, you don't deserve a say.

And that's how Jim Crow 2.0 is done.

[derby378]

3. Old news, but yeah, it's no less infuriating

Remember, back in 2009, Republican legislators in the Texas House of Representatives were so hell-bent on passing Voter ID that they scuttled their own time-honored rules of procedure just so they could keep Democrats from blocking a vote on the Voter ID bill. The result was a five-day filibuster on the House floor, courtesy of Democratic legislators, that stretched over Memorial Day weekend. When the dust settled, Voter ID was dead, but so were hundreds of other bills which were simply tossed aside by House Republicans in a vain effort to save the measure. One of those bills thrown on the funeral pyre was a campus concealed-carry bill, which had already passed the Texas Senate and was simply awaiting a vote in the House.

So now they've got Voter ID, and it's doing exactly what we warned Texas it would do, but nobody cares - except for those who just lost the right to vote through no fault of their own. You can usually identify them by their skin color.

[Gothmog]

4. The GOP had to cheat to win this race

The race would have been much closer. The good thing is that we can document that Greg Abbott lied in the briefs filed with the 5th Cir. and the SCOTUS. Greg claimed that no voters would be prevented from voting due to the voter id law. That claim was false at the time he made it and there is now a ton of documentation showing that Greg is a liar

[City Lights]

5. The GOPee has had to cheat to win for years.

I'm not referring to just Texas...I mean all across the US.