NEW SMYRNA BEACH -- Is there no end to hypocrisy when it comes to the argument about legal voters being required to show legitimate identification in order to exercise this important right? To get a library card, board a plane, cash a check, drive a vehicle, buy a bottle of wine and in many other ordinary life events, we are required to produce picture identification.
Yes, sometimes it is annoying, as when a youngster behind a cash register demands that gray-headed grandpa produce ID to acquire that bottle of merlot. But we do it because we value the library card, the flight to visit family across the country or that glass of wine with dinner.
Educate me if I am wrong, but I sure don’t remember the U.S. Department of Justice slapping down governments for passing the laws requiring ID for any of the above. However, our current DOJ has determined that requiring proof that one is a citizen of this country and registered voter in the state, county, precinct, etc., is a grievous conspiracy to suppress voting.
Texas and South Carolina are currently under fire from the DOJ for having passed voter ID laws that legally exist in 30 other states, including Florida.
I just don’t get it!
Apparently lots of others – including DOJ and other organizations that are vehemently denouncing recently enacted state laws requiring identification – don’t get it either. If you wish to enter the offices of the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. , for example, you must show picture identification. How’s that for irony as well as hypocrisy?
In a recent video exposé making its way around the Internet, journalist Scott Ott was told time after time that showing picture identification was a requirement of entering theWashington offices of such opponents of voter identification laws as the Center for American Progress.
Call me old-fashioned, but I was raised to believe that voting was not only a right but a privilege. Being a citizen of our democratic republic conferred responsibility for not just exercising but guarding such rights and paying attention to issues and the positions of candidates.
Call me old-fashioned, but I was raised to believe that voting was not only a right but a privilege. Being a citizen of our democratic republic conferred responsibility for not just exercising but guarding such rights and paying attention to issues and the positions of candidates.
Now, I don’t want to deny a citizen a vote because he/she doesn’t engage at the level of civic attention that I do, but what is the problem with having to show that you are legally exercising this right? The evil days of poll taxes and literacy tests are over, but the DOJ and other opponents of voter ID seem to be trying to equate reasonable proof with long gone Jim Crow laws.
Wanting to be fair, I’ve tried to fathom the logic of the DOJ and other groups who frame the requirement to produce proof that one is entitled to vote as “voter suppression.”
However, I can’t come up with any reason other than the tacit enabling of election fraud.