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New Hampshire Gov. Vetoes Voting Restriction Bill

Posted by: Linda Carbonell on June 28, 2011.

06-28-2011 by Linda S. Carbonell

Gov. John Lynch

Approximately twenty-one million adult Americans do not have government issued identification. Those are twenty-one million eligible voters that Republicans want to keep from voting. Governor John Lynch of New Hampshire, on Monday, made sure that the adults in his state who do not have photo ID’s will still be able to vote.

The Republican-sponsored bill, SB129, would have established a two-tier system for being identified as an eligible voter, increased the cost of elections and held up result reporting for at least three days in close elections. As Gov. Lynch stated, the bill sought to solve a problem that New Hampshire doesn’t have – widespread voter fraud.

Accusations of voter fraud have been part of the Republican mantra since Nixon lost to Kennedy and Richard Daley Sr. was mayor of Chicago. Even if Illinois’ electoral votes were stolen from Nixon, he still would have lost, but that’s a simple fact that never makes it in to the narrative. Since Clinton beat Bush 41, the mantra has turned into a ceaseless scream. In the Republican mind, every election has been rife with fraud. They have even, since President Obama was elected, added to the scream an accusation that illegal immigrants voted for him and that’s why he won the election. To them, voter fraud is the only reason they could have possibly lost any election, ever. So, having convince their base that there is a rampant voter fraud problem, they have stepped forward to solve it with bills in dozens of states that create barriers to voting. Not coincidentally, those barriers target the kind of people who vote for Democrats.

Voting rights will not fare so well in Ohio, the next state to tackle this problem that doesn’t exist. Governor John Kasich has been proving since January that he is not only a hard-core Tea Partier, he’s petty as well. He had the gall to admit that his attack on public sector unions had more than a little to do with a bad encounter with a police officer who offended him.

Eighteen percent of seniors do not have photo ID’s, probably because they have given up their driver’s licenses for the safety of the community. Twenty-five percent of African-Americans don’t have one. City dwellers are most likely to not have driver’s licenses because of public transportation. Fifteen percent of those earning less than $35,000 a year don’t have driver’s licenses. The deeper one digs into the statistics of those who for one reason or another do not have photo ID’s, the more one discovers Democratic-leaning voters.

Governor John Lynch is a Democrat. In those states passing voting-restricting laws where the governor is a Republican, the laws will have to be challenged in the Federal courts. It might be a good idea if those challenges were timed so as to not arrive at the United States Supreme Court before election day 2012, unless one of the five justices who have been doing everything they could to undermine free elections in this country retires or resigns.