The War on Voting
Democracy in the United States of America has always been a struggle and perhaps it will always be this way.
We celebrate Independence Day and the idea that "all people are created equal" without prolonged discussion of all the people who were not allowed to vote back in 1776 such as women, Native Americans, African Americans.
As long as we've been a country, powerful rulers have tried to thwart and obfuscate the voting process for many Americans, particularly those without access to education and economic resources.
The only surprising thing is that this is even surprising. As Frederick Douglass observed long ago: "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
The current Voter ID battles for the election of 2012 are the latest chapter in this saga. The concerted effort by Republican officials across the country to orchestrate voter ID laws is remarkable in its coordination and ruthlessness.
Witness the case of Viviette Applewhite in Pennsylvania, a 93-year-old woman who has been voting in Presidential Elections since the 1940s and will now be unable to vote under the new Pennsylvania Voter ID law.
This is clearly a miscarriage of justice that no law should ever intentionally subject on a citizen. It is directly counter to our national goal of participatory democracy and civic involvement. And yet no leading Republican official on the national scene has had the courage to speak out on this travesty.
The Pennsylvania law alone has the potential disenfranchise over 750,000 voters. This in a state that has had no cases of voter fraud in at least a decade.
The election of 2012 will be a year of epic battles in our nation's ongoing struggle to create a participatory democracy.
It will be a nasty and ugly fight, but it will also make for a great story. This struggle is a major theme for my upcoming novel The Voting Machine, a sequel to my literary mystery Employee of the Year.
We celebrate Independence Day and the idea that "all people are created equal" without prolonged discussion of all the people who were not allowed to vote back in 1776 such as women, Native Americans, African Americans.
As long as we've been a country, powerful rulers have tried to thwart and obfuscate the voting process for many Americans, particularly those without access to education and economic resources.
The only surprising thing is that this is even surprising. As Frederick Douglass observed long ago: "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
The current Voter ID battles for the election of 2012 are the latest chapter in this saga. The concerted effort by Republican officials across the country to orchestrate voter ID laws is remarkable in its coordination and ruthlessness.
Witness the case of Viviette Applewhite in Pennsylvania, a 93-year-old woman who has been voting in Presidential Elections since the 1940s and will now be unable to vote under the new Pennsylvania Voter ID law.
This is clearly a miscarriage of justice that no law should ever intentionally subject on a citizen. It is directly counter to our national goal of participatory democracy and civic involvement. And yet no leading Republican official on the national scene has had the courage to speak out on this travesty.
The Pennsylvania law alone has the potential disenfranchise over 750,000 voters. This in a state that has had no cases of voter fraud in at least a decade.
The election of 2012 will be a year of epic battles in our nation's ongoing struggle to create a participatory democracy.
It will be a nasty and ugly fight, but it will also make for a great story. This struggle is a major theme for my upcoming novel The Voting Machine, a sequel to my literary mystery Employee of the Year.
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