Saturday, August 18, 2012

THE RIGHT TO VOTE

It has been said that the Constitution does not guarantee the right to vote. But there are several amendments that do in fact address voting, and they are as follows:

Amendment XV Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Amendment XIX The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Amendment XXIV Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax. Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Amendment XXVI Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age. Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Amendment XV was passed after the Civil War and gave the right to vote to black men. Yes, although the word people is used, the Fifteenth Amendment gave suffrage only to men. It was not only 1920, fifty years after this that the nineteenth amendment gave women the right to vote. The twenty-fourth Amendment, part of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s helped blacks in the South overcome Jim Crow to get to the polls. The twenty-sixth amendment lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen, with argument that if eighteen-year olds were old enough to fight and die for the country, they should have the right to vote. So we do have Constitutional rights to vote, but no one amendment that makes voting an absolute right. In other words, there are always ways to keep people away from the poll without saying you can’t vote because of age, race, gender, or taxes. Seems like a comprehensive list.

That is, until the Republican Party saw a new possibility. Photo IDs are now required in many office buildings, and they are in fact easy to obtain if you happen to work in the building. If you are going into a security-conscious building in, say, New York, City, you are usually asked for a photo ID, and the number one form of this is the driver’s license. Hey, thought some Republicans, let’s demand photo ID from voters, claiming that we need it to protect against voter fraud, which by the way is so low these days that the percentage is something lower than 1 percent.

The idea was clever on their part because they realize (as does everyone else) that poor people, people of color, Hispanics, and the elderly are least likely to have photo ID. It has also been found that a majority of these people are likely to vote Democrat. It is no wonder that State Representative Mike Turzai, a Republican and the Pennsylvania House majority leader, gleefully announced in front of a video camera, when the new law in Pennsylvania requiring photo ID to vote passed that “voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania: done.”

If that weren’t enough, when the law was challenged in court, a Republican judge declared the new voter identification law could take effect. At the same time, the Republican governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Corbett squashed the plan to allow voters to apply online for absentee ballots for the November election and to register online to vote.

Why, after all these years, do we not have a partisan election commission in each state that works to guarantee that every citizen who is qualified not be deprived of the right to vote? It is long overdue. As for voter ID, it should be sufficient for someone to show a utility bill that came to them through the mail, together with a birth certificate. There are a number of pieces of identification that should qualify, and the fact is that these pieces of ID are good enough to guarantee authenticity as much as a driver’s license or passport, both of which can be forged (for those who claim that’s the reason for the photo ID). Combined with the low level of voter fraud in this country, that should be enough. Indeed, it is not voter fraud we have to worry about but voter apathy.

1 comment:

Mumphrey said...

I came here after reading your great thoughts at the Washington Post. I’ll have to make a habit of checking in here to read more of your thoughts.