Quote:

---

Residents of Virginia and Arkansas may be getting carded at places other than nightclubs come 2014. Both states have passed stricter election laws that require voters to show approved photo ID before they can cast their ballots. On Monday, the Republican-controlled Arkansas legislature overrode a veto from Democratic governor Mike Beebe, who called the law “an expensive solution in search of a problem.” Republican governor Bob McDonnell signed Virginia’s bill into law on March 26.

Both laws are part of the “endless partisan cycle of fights over the election rules,” says Rick Hasen, an election law expert and professor at the University of California at Irvine. The classic conservative argument is that such laws are needed to combat voter fraud. The classic liberal retort is that voter fraud is a red herring and such laws are really attempts to suppress voters who lean Democratic—because voting blocs like the young, elderly and minorities disproportionately lack photo ID.

Hasen, author of The Voting Wars, says that voter fraud is a small problem but that impersonation voter fraud—the type such laws protect against is “virtually non-existent."
.....
Virginia and other states like Texas that have already passed more restrictive voter ID laws have an extra hurdle to clear before the laws can go into effect. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which is being reviewed and may be struck down by the Supreme Court, requires that states, counties and townships with a history of racial discrimination get approval from the Department of Justice before making changes to their voting laws. Hasen says “smart money” is on Section 5 soon being a thing of the past.

Bowser notes that, according to their tallies of bills and laws, more than 15 states could have stricter ID requirements heading into the 2016 elections—though changes in all those states are unlikely. Hasen predicts more states will be asking for photo ID when voters head out to choose the next President, but he says those measures won’t affect elections nearly as much as rules about voter registration or how well the polls are run. After the long lines that discouraged thousands of potential voters in 2012, Obama vowed to address the problems in his most recent State of the Union address. And to that end, he created a bipartisan commission on March 28 to study how to ease voter access. More at http://swampland.time.com/2013/04/04/a-license-to-vote-gop-lawmakers-p
ush-voter-ids/#ixzz2PW1GrtDP
I sincerely hope Obama has luck at easing voter access. Hopefully there will be enough time between now and 2014 to register and get IDs for people to exercise their right to vote; the other voter-suppression methods will go on, as they have, forever.

The article notes that

Quote:

---

A more powerful reason that Republicans and Democrats continually engage in these bouts over the rules, he says, is that both sides can use them to excite their bases: GOP supporters get riled up about the prospect of Democrats stealing elections and liberals get fired up about the prospect of Republicans trying to suppress them.

---

I concur; the difference is that getting more Republicans excited to go out and vote doesn't STOP citizens who are Democrats FROM VOTING, so if the voter-ID bullshit excites Democrats to get out and vote, and makes those it would affect get out and get IDs, that's fine with me.

The only actual facts are that voter fraud ITSELF is not a problem, and the kind of fraud these IDs would protect against is TRULY "virtually non-existent", which gives the lie to why they want it.