March 7, 2011- Peter Wallsten reports in the Washington Post today on the latest wave of Republican efforts to pass state laws requiring picture IDs for voters. "Backers of the voting measures," says Wallsten, "say they would bring fairness and restore confidence in a voting system vulnerable to fraud."
Well, yes, that is what they say. They're lying, but that's what they say. The real reason that Republicans are so gung ho on these measures, even though there's no measurable voting-booth fraud anywhere in the United States, is because certain demographic groups are less likely to have picture IDs than others:
An analysis by the North Carolina State Board of Elections showed that any new law requiring a state-issued ID could be problematic for large numbers of voters, particularly African Americans, whose turnout in 2008 helped Obama win the state.
Blacks account for about one-fifth of the North Carolina electorate but are a larger share — 27 percent — of the approximately 1 million voters who may lack a state-issued ID or whose names do not exactly match the Division of Motor Vehicles database. The analysis found about 556,000 voters with no record of an ID issued by the DMV.