A few bits of good news, four

The drive to limit access to the voting booth among the elderly, the poor, and minorities by imposing requirements for government-issued photo IDs to be presented at time of voting no longer has the air of inevitability it gained in the wake of the Supreme Court's foul endorsement of Indiana's law, thanks to two bits of good news.

First, last week a bill in the Missouri legislature to create the nation's strictest voter ID law failed to reach the floor of the state Senate and so died with the end of the legislative session. As Art Levine at the Huffington Post had it,

[a]n angry outpouring from senior citizens, nuns, the disabled and others who would be blocked from voting under the proposed constitutional amendment, led by a broad-based progressive coalition that included the AARP, swamped Republican legislators with over 4,000 phone calls and an outcry from local newspapers.

Julie Terbrock, the legislative director for Missouri ACORN and a member of the Missourians for Fair Elections coalition, points out, "The legislators felt the heat from average people in their district, including senior citizens, and it became too much for them to take."

The bill had already passed the House and supposedly had enough votes in the Senate, but never came up. Supporters made a number of lame excuses like too much time was spent on other measures, but that seems like nothing more than a feeble attempt to save face: If it really was so vitally important to stop the supposed flood of fraudulent votes the GOP is forever claiming exists, surely the session could have been extended a few hours or some other measure put on the shelf to make time.

The proposed measure would not only have required showing a government-issued photo ID at the time of voting (despite the fact that there has never been a prosecution for voting with phony ID in Missouri), it would have required the presentation of a passport or a birth certificate in order to register to vote, the better, apparently, to deter those hordes of illegal aliens flocking to Missouri to vote there. The Missouri Secretary of State's office estimated that 240,000 Missourians could have lost the right to vote under this law and thousands more might never be able to register for lack of the demanded documents.

And second, a few days later, Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius vetoed a bill that would have required photo ID to vote in that state.

Sebelius said “HB 2019 seeks to solve a problem of voter fraud which does not exist in our state due to the tireless efforts of our local elected officials.”

She said the voter ID proposal wasn’t needed and “will only work to disenfranchise many of the electorate and serve as a barrier to their participation in the democratic process.”

Hilariously, the Kansas GOP responded by saying that Sebelius had "taken fear mongering to a whole new level" by mentioning the potential for disenfranchising voters.

So two good bits. There is, of course, a "but," although this one might be considered a "semi-but." A big campaign against "voter fraud" - none of which fraud, oh so curiously, seems to involve GOPpers - continues in Texas. But it's starting to look odd even to people there. From the Dallas Morning News for last Sunday, via TPM:

More than two years ago, Republican Attorney General Greg Abbott pledged to root out what he called an epidemic of voter fraud in Texas.

He established a special unit in his office, tapped a $1.4 million federal crime-fighting grant and dispatched investigators.

Since then, Mr. Abbott has prosecuted 26 cases - all against Democrats, and almost all involving blacks or Hispanics, a review by The Dallas Morning News shows.

The cases usually have resulted in small fines and little or no jail time, and for all the extra attention, Mr. Abbott has not unraveled any large-scale schemes with the potential to swing elections.

Eighteen of the 26 cases involved people who collected and mailed absentee ballots without putting their own names and addresses on the outside of the envelopes, the latter of which violates state election law, a technical point about which it's reasonable to wonder how many people knew. Of the rest, only one and perhaps two - a woman who voted for her dead mother and a man who voted twice - could even possibly have been affected by a voter ID law; the others involved illegal registrations.

So after two years and $1.4 million in other people's money, Abbott came up with 26 cases, 18 of which are minor technicalities and none of which could even potentially affect an election. Some epidemic.

Meanwhile,

[i]n 2005, more than 100 ballots – potentially more than in all of Mr. Abbott's other vote-fraud prosecutions combined – were mishandled in an election in Highland Park. ...

Then Dallas County District Attorney Bill Hill's office forwarded the complaints to Mr. Abbott, but no acton was taken.

Are you surprised to find that Highland Park is over 97% white and has the third highest per capita income in Texas?