There is a highly organized wave of new voter ID laws in Republican controlled swing states designed to keep down the vote from the poor, young and powerless. Thanks to the Supreme Court's decision in Citizen's United v. FEC, in 2010 tons of corporate cash was used to buy up control of state legislatures and/or governor seats in swing states like Ohio, Florida, Missouri and Wisconsin. EJ Dionne covered this story in the Washington Post.
Sometimes the partisan motivation is so clear that if Stephen Colbert reported on what’s transpiring, his audience would assume he was making it up. In Texas, for example, the law allows concealed handgun licenses as identification but not student IDs. And guess what? Nationwide exit polls show that John McCain carried households in which someone owned a gun by 25 percentage points but lost voters in households without a gun by 32 points.Besides Texas, states that enacted voter ID laws this year include Kansas, Wisconsin, South Carolina and Tennessee. Indiana and Georgia already had such requirements. The Maine Legislature voted to end same-day voter registration. Florida seems determined to go back to the chaos of the 2000 election. It shortened the early voting period, effectively ended the ability of registered voters to correct their address at the polls and imposed onerous restrictions on organized voter-registration drives.
