There’s this wonderful Italian restaurant in Georgetown called Filomena.
One of the exceptional waiters there, Anton Innerst, dressed to the nines, hails from Lansdowne, Virginia.
The other evening, a young guest came in with her family, and Anton asked the young lady, “have you registered to vote yet?” She apparently hadn’t considered it yet. It was a friendly conversation and he said to her, “It’s your future.” She seemed to agree. But he said afterwards, it was his future as well. You can certainly appreciate what it means to lose the vote when your future depends on it.
Well, here in Virginia, our General Assembly is trying to deny some of us the right to vote. Unfortunately, Virginia is not the only state. Many other states are doing the same thing. There have been initiatives across the country to disenfranchise minorities, the poor, the elderly and students.
The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU has concluded that millions of Americans will lose the right to vote – or only get the vote if someone will help them do so. We’re talking about reducing our voting population by 5 million votes nation-wide.
The states that have cut back on voting rights supply 185 electoral votes of the 270 needed to elect a president. That’s two-thirds of what a candidate must win to become president. 6 of the 12 battle ground states have either cut back voting rights or are considering doing so. We are running the clock on voting rights backward a hundred years or more.
Paul Weyrich, an evangelical leader once said, “As a matter of fact our leverage in elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” The strategy is clear, to have a reduced electorate like that had in the off-year congressional election in 2010 (when Republicans shifted leadership in the Congress), rather than having more voting like the more inclusive presidential election of 2008.
This is a calculated effort to disrupt voting rights by – 1) New photo ID laws – requiring a state issued ID – that may require other proof including a birth certificate that is not easy to obtain and may be unaffordable. No, not everyone does drive, can drive or ever did drive – so they haven’t had ID that satisfies the new rules. 2) There are new limitations on voter registration drives to make it harder to register. 3) There are efforts to eliminate Election Day registration. 4) Other states are curtailing the early voting period – cutting it shorter.
The pretense for these “election reforms” is that this will prevent fraud. Of course, there hasn’t been any widespread or even isolated fraud that could possibly justify these sweeping reforms, disenfranchising so many; rather, this is about limiting the vote instead, suppressing it, you know like those old Jim Crow laws.
You may think, when you hear this discussion, I have an ID. And you do. But more people than you think don’t. Not only do they not drive, so they don’t have a driver’s license, they rely on cash-checking stores that don’t require the kind of ID the state is mandating in this post 9-11 world -- when it’s harder than ever to get ID.
The New Dominion is becoming the old South once more. At the current legislative session in Richmond, only days ago, Virginia joined the rank of States passing laws to curtail voting rights, requiring photo IDs to vote, and a 5 day waiting period after you register to vote.
There’s a way to circumvent these cynical obstacles to voting your mind. Volunteer to help those that they don’t want to vote - so they do get to vote – and contribute the time, bureaucratic know-how, and, yes, the money needed, so that they can meet the strictures of the new unfair election laws – until we can correct them.
Oh yes, and then work hard with these recovered votes, rescued from the cynical machinations of those who pretend to care about democracy, and throw the bums out of office the very next time you can for having the nerve to take away the vote from our most fragile citizens. Don’t you agree that, when a legislator votes to restrict someone’s franchise in a democracy, he should forfeit the right to represent us at all with his vote in the legislature.
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