Georgia Vote Suppression Still Illegal

Another loss for the Poor Voter Disenfranchisement Act. The most instructive information is this:

Perdue and other proponents of the law said it is needed to curtail fraud. They cited an Atlanta Journal-Constitution article that said 5,000 dead people were listed as having voted in the eight elections preceding 2000.

But the fraud happened primarily in absentee balloting, Barnes said. Under the new law, absentee voters are not required to show identification.

“This is the most sinister scheme I’ve ever seen,” Barnes said, “and it’s going on nationwide.”

But, of course, people who cast absentee ballots–which are far more vulnerable to fraud–are disproportionately Republican, so that kind of fraud is acceptable. You may remember the same routine from Florida in 2000. The Florida Courts interpreted the state’s “intent of the voter” standard generously whether it was people at the voting booth or military absentee ballots, while Republicans argued that technically illegal military ballots should be allowed and vote counts that might catch ballots that were erroneously not counted not permitted–and the Florida Courts were roundly assailed as political hacks. At any rate, it’s already harder to vote in the United States than in most if not all liberal democracies, and given that the evidence that this reduces fraud (let alone enough to justify the far lower rates of participation inevitably created by these rules) is as far as I can tell non-existent, rules that make it harder should be looked at extremely skeptically, and rejected out of hand when they’re as transparently outcome-oriented as the Georgia law.