goupstate.com
Editorial
Published: Friday, December 30, 2011 at 3:15 a.m.

Second-class state

Indiana requires its voters to show a photo ID. So do Rhode Island and several other states. So why is South Carolina not allowed to require voters to show a photo ID to provide additional reliability in our elections?

Because the federal government has a supervisory power over South Carolina that it doesn’t have over those other states. South Carolina falls under the Voting Rights Act. Indiana and Rhode Island do not.

When those states passed their laws, they didn’t have to send them to the U.S. Justice Department for approval. South Carolina did.

And the Justice Department rejected South Carolina’s law. It said it did so because the law would discriminate against the poor and minorities, both of whom may not have photo ID.

That’s nonsense. The state was offering a photo ID to people for free. Anyone could get one.

You need a photo ID to drive a car, cash a check or buy certain cold medicines. How is it unrealistic to expect people to produce a photo ID to vote? If the Justice Department truly believes this discriminates against poor people, then why does the federal government sometimes require the poor to produce a photo ID when obtaining government benefits?

This decision was political, pure and simple. South Carolina is a Republican-dominated state, which made the Obama Administration feel free to try to kill jobs here by suing Boeing for putting a plant here. It’s even more natural for the partisan White House to side with Democratic opposition to this bill.

Indiana’s law also faced opposition, but those opponents were forced to challenge the law in the courts. In the end, the courts upheld Indiana’s law. That should have ended the controversy about South Carolina’s similar law.

But opponents of this state’s law didn’t have to go to the courts. They could approach their political allies in the White House and get them to reject the law.

There is simply no reason South Carolina’s laws should be subject to a political veto by the White House. This represents an abuse of federal power.

The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 to address racial discrimination in voting procedures. The states covered by the act, including South Carolina, had a history of enacting voting policies that discriminated against minority voters. Congress stepped in to make sure that all Americans had an equal right to vote.

Congress was justified in passing the act in 1965, but it had no legitimate reason to reauthorize the act in 2006. The discriminatory practices of 44 years earlier were gone. The states covered by the act have no more election problems than states not covered by the act. Congress should have instituted national reforms at that time or let the act expire.

Instead, it decided to continue the law for 25 years. That means that until 2031, there will be two classes of states. One class will have its sovereignty and the ability to make its own laws. The other class, which includes South Carolina, has less sovereignty and is subject to more federal oversight.

This is not only unjustifiable, it is unconstitutional.

South Carolina officials who say they will appeal the Justice Department decision on the voter ID bill should also contest the constitutional basis for the Voting Rights Act at this point in time. South Carolina deserves as much right as Indiana, Rhode Island, Kansas or Wisconsin to require its voters to present photo IDs.

http://www.goupstate.com/article/201...1130?p=2&tc=pg