Wednesday, April 30, 2008

McIlheran: Buy Our Elephant Repellent

You know the old joke that goes something like this:
"Hey, mister, you better buy a bottle of my Elephant Repellent. If you don't buy it, the elephants will come into the neighborhood and trample you! My proof that this stuff really works is that there are no elephants around here."

Well, that is what McIlheran is telling us when he touts SCOTUS's ruling to uphold Indiana's Voter ID law, in his column in this morning's paper.

Unfortunately, there are too many that buy into this false argument. And this is unfortunate, since it has been proven to be a bogus talking point, time and time again, that there is not enough fraud to justify the disenfranchisement of more than a hundred thousand people in Wisconsin alone.

McIlheran tries to say that people wouldn't be disenfranchised because the state could provide free IDs to those who need it, or to use other forms of identification. But in the same breath, he advocates for the abolishment of same-day registration, which, ironically, uses the same forms of ID he says is OK. Go figure.

Not only does McIlheran, who claims to hate taxes, advocate for this unnecessary tax burden (and I thought he only did that for unnecessary freeway expansions), but fails to acknowledge that one of the problems is that the poor are often transient. So this may require multiple issuings of a picture ID to the same person, just to keep it current and accurate. How much you would want to bet he'd be blaming the ever increasing tax on the nearest Democrat?

Despite all of his posturing, McIlheran is not really sincere in his interest to stop the non-existent voter fraud. For if he was, his first concern would be to clean up the largest area of voter fraud, the absentee ballot. But he wouldn't dare do that. That's the Republicans' favorite way of committing their own fraud while throwing their red herrings at the poor, the minorities and the elderly to keep the public's attention from the real concern.

No comments:

Post a Comment