Jim Crow Gets a Vote

[SoCalDem]

On the Lege
Jim Crow Gets a Vote
BY AMY SMITH
http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/column?oid=oid%3A471792

Sen. Rodney Ellis has vowed that the Senate's 11 Democrats will block any voter-ID bills from coming to the floor.
Photo By John Anderson

Election day calamities – technical glitches, human errors, hanging chads – do happen, often enough to affect the vote and embarrass the republic. One might think that it would be an appointed task of elected officials to address those widespread voting problems that are all too common and readily visible. Instead, Texas Republican leaders, with the active promotion of the national GOP (see the Gonzales/Rove federal attorneys' scandal), have concocted another, much more phantom malady that they nevertheless claim threatens to drive the system to ruin. So this session, as in the last, they are seeking to curb what they insist is a growing national problem of noncitizens voting illegally.

Democrats respond that the problem is all in Republicans' heads.

In the past two weeks, the House has passed two "Voter ID" bills, and one of them cleared a Senate committee on Monday. The House passed the second one on Tuesday night, this one requiring the Secretary of State's Office to verify the citizenship of new voter registrants. House Democratic leader Jim Dunnam, in an impassioned floor speech before the vote, denounced the stepped-up requirement as "just more sophisticated Jim Crow."

[wakeme2008]

1. The Repugs hate the Motor Voter law and will

do anything to do away with it. :grr: