Latest Outrage- Voting Rights Assaults

So now in the news we have various states with Republican leadership instituting strict voter registration laws.  In Florida they have developed lists of people suspected of being ineligible to vote, and the governor insists on following through even though the lists have been shown to have many mistakes.  In Pennsylvania Republican lawmakers are bragging about how the new voter ID law will help Mitt Romney get elected.  And this story from the Florida article is a great illustration:

But if you want a new law that the government is seriously ill-equipped to enforce, look to Mississippi. In order to get a free voter ID card there, you need to supply a birth certificate. Some women, with new married names, are unable to use birth certificates to prove their identity. If they lack copies of their birth certificates, they need to apply for them with—of course—some kind of ID card.

 Now governments are big bureaucracies, and they're trying to serve millions of people, so there are going to be mistakes.  Injustice happens, and sometimes can't be avoided.  But if you're going to put in a system that will result in false positives for illegals and disenfranchise legitimate voters, there needs to be a good reason.  And in the case of Voter ID laws, there just isn't a good reason.  Nobody is organizing campaigns to get illegal immigrants and felons to vote.  Voter fraud is practically nonexistent in the US.

But really we all know what's going on.  The Republican party is trying to disenfranchise people who are more likely to vote Democratic.  Of course, most of us have valid state IDs, but who doesn't have them?  Poor people.  Whose birth certificates may not match their current name?  Married women. Who is more likely to mistakenly end up on a list of undocumented immigrants?  Latino immigrants.

This goes past dirty tricks and gets to something much more serious- it's a bald subversion of Democracy, on the level of the old Southern "poll tax" and the original "grandfather clause", first used in the old South to make sure that the grandchildren of slaves could not vote.  This stuff is the whole reason that the Voting Rights Act was passed in the first place.  I know I'm getting hyperbolic here, but this is really serious!  It's stealing elections!  Eric Holder and the Obama administration has to fight this tooth and nail, with every tool they have.