Washington        It is the damnest thing that in this country we trumpet democracy all around the world but we simply cannot seem to get our government to commit to making voting something that is easy and accessible.  

    The Supreme Court seems to have beaten and bloodied the lawyers from Indiana pretty badly yesterday for arguing that having picture identification, such as a driver’s license, had an adverse impact on particularly lower-income voters.  Even Justice Kennedy, whose middle road vote is critical on these matters, was bellyaching about how much it was really a problem.  The compromise being suggested would have people voting and then having 10-days to drag ass down to a county office and get checked against their birth certificate or something.  People are really going to do that — NOT!

    What problem are we solving with all of this?  Not the problem of getting the non-voting half of the country out to the polls to saddle up and participate in this “system” of democratic pretense.  We are trying to root out voting fraud despite the fact that the cases are so minimal as to almost be unknown when compared to the number of elections in the country and people voting every year.  Less than 25 per year according to Mike Slater with Project Vote in a recent report from what I remember.

    Talk about overkill!  In order to prevent a couple of so-called fraud cases that had no impact on election outcomes, we are going to make the ballot box more inaccessible to millions of potential voters and send a chilling message to millions more that it is hard to vote.  Of course that would affect election outcomes, and that’s probably more to the point.

    We ought to stop nitpicking and start pushing for mandatory voting!