So, in an election in which only the truly informed and motivated vote, Mr. Preston discovered that only the truly informed and motivated went to vote. We will surely see smooth sailing in the next big election. Everyone eligible will get to vote. Yeah, right.
He even mentions that 90 year old Jim Wright had to go home and get his birth certificate. Suppose that, instead of a former Speaker, Mr. Wright were a poor old guy who had no idea where his birth certificate was, or how to get one, or the money to pay for one. Dontcha think his vote might have been a teeny bit suppressed?
If the point of the law ISN’T voter suppression, then what is the point? It can’t be to preserve the vote, since there is virtually no voter fraud, and what there is wouldn’t be prevented by photo IDs.
All hat, no cattle. A pinata full of bullshit. Works for Laura Ingrown. Surprise, surprise.
First off, an “off year election”. What sort of idjit doesn’t know what that means as regards voter turnout? He wants to take the least inspiring situation?
What a crock of shit! “Well, the number of voters didn’t go down, like the lefties said it would, so they must be wrong!” Podnuh, because population grows, you have to expect that number to go up, unless there is some artificial hindrance. You got nothing worth saying until there is a real rip-roaring, hell bent for leather election!
Especially loved ths droll bit of non-partisan humor:
Har de har har, that there is a knee-slapper! Dennis Miller is going to steal that, fer sure and fer certain!
Hoss, that was last year’s folksy. Get your folksy-talkin’ update at Downhome 'R Us.com.
Yeah, it was just terrible, having to haul my driver’s license out, the same way that I have done for the last 20 years or so. I honestly can’t remember when the last time was I showed a pictureless Texas voter registration card.
Then you haven’t showed a Texas voter registration card at all, because they don’t have pictures on them. It isn’t a problem to haul out your driver’s license, if you have one. Speaker Wright is 90 years old. His driver’s license is expired, so it was invalid for use as a picture ID for voting. Is there anything about a person’s identity that changes with the expiration of a driver’s license? If he was James Wright in 1992 (for example), doesn’t it follow that he is still James Wright in 2013?
That’s probably true in the context of old people (who don’t get a new license). But I have to say, when my driver’s licenses have expired (and I’ve gotten a new one), I’ve still had the old one. Indeed, in college, people would use the expired licenses of their siblings to get into bars when underage (assuming they looked somewhat like the sibling). So, as a blanket rule, it would be easy to use an expired license to pretend to be someone you aren’t.
In a bit of irony, Greg Abbott, the current Attorney General (and odds-on favorite to be next governor of Texas), was only allowed to vote because of an amendment to the Voter ID law added by Wendy Davis. An amendment he opposed, I might add. Abbott’s state ID didn’t match his voter registration information.
So, he was nearly disenfranchised by the law he championed and only saved by his political opponent on a measure he himself opposed.
Wendy Davis herself had to cast a provisional ballot since her ID doesn’t match her registration information, either. Apparently, several married women are running into this problem as well due to name changes.
I guess you can claim the system works, since they still got to cast ballots, but I challenge anybody to say this is how any of the crafters of the bill believed it should have worked.
Do you have any idea how name changes work in Texas? For example, I know that here, when you go to the DMV to get your name changed, you get a new voter registration form. So, maybe both your license and voter registration are under your old name. Or both under the new name. But it would be odd for them to be different, I think.
She didn’t have to use a provisional ballot; the amendment that Davis successfully added to the ID law allows the voter to execute an affidavit that they’re the same person if the names on their ID and voter registration are “substantially similar”, which enables the voter to cast a regular ballot.