Editorial: Fix the shameful practice of making it hard to vote : Stltoday

Editorial: Fix the shameful practice of making it hard to vote : Stltoday

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In U.S. v. Cruikshank in 1876, a Reconstruction-era Supreme Court declined to extend the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the 14th Amendment to individuals. The result was that southern Democrats were free to enact voting laws that denied the vote to anyone they wanted, i.e, black people.

Cruikshank has been superseded by other court rulings, but state governments continue to control the voting process. Statehouses, as those of us in Missouri and Illinois know full well, tend to be full of highly partisan people. One of them, Mike Turzai, the Republican majority leader of the Pennsylvania House, was at least honest when he boasted in June that his state’s voter ID law was designed to help Mitt Romney win the presidential election.

Since early 2011, 27 voter suppression actions were taken in 19 separate states, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Voters turned down some of them, courts threw out others and the Department of Justice blocked some.

It really shouldn’t be this hard, but states have been suppressing voters since the 1850s, when Connecticut and Massachusetts imposed literacy tests to keep new Irish-born citizens out of the polls. Poll taxes in the South were barred until 1966; the last of the literacy tests didn’t disappear until 1970.
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soar members reported some delays in voting (hour delay in line), most were in and out in less than half that time in most places.