Republicans in Missouri are trying to prevent 240,000 (mostly black) voters from voting by insisting on identity cards at polling stations. In order to get a card you have to have a birth certificate.
Statement from Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan:
“As Missouri’s chief elections official, it’s my job to ensure fair elections, and elections cannot be fair if eligible voters are not allowed to vote. Many of the registered voters who do not have the type of government ID required also do not have copies of the documents needed to obtain a government ID in the first place — like a birth certificate. We know that getting copies of these can be costly, time consuming and sometimes impossible.
“It would be unacceptable for a voter to be denied the right to vote in America merely because an inefficient government bureaucracy can not provide a copy of a birth certificate to one of its citizens. I urge the legislature to reject any proposal that could put the voting rights of up to 240,000 Missourians at risk.”
This is undemocratic and a political scam . Epicurus would have deplored it and explained that this is why one should shy away from politics. My answer to that, on the contrary, it is precisely the reason to get involved and to fight for democratic rights. How can we send young men to Iraq to install a democracy (excuse me!) and take away our own people’s rights?
To answer the question: quite easily. What we are fighting over is power, just power. Democracy is only useful if it can be manipulated to your ends. You extend the franchise, fill the heads of the quarter-informed electors with patriotic blah, tell them the other side are going to tax them into poverty, exclude as many of the other side as you can without rebellion, and thus retain power. It is a wholly cynical matter, brilliantly operated by such malevolents as Rove, and it takes overwhelming power-hunger, not rocket science. However, it sometimes takes a foreigner to see through the hypocrisy simply because new-comers like me have been educated to understand that one’s own side can actually be bad at times and good at times and one’s country of birth is not after all, some “city on a hill” and “the light of the world”. We have not been through the nationalist brain-washing, otherwise known as grades 1-7.
Agh! Get back to the Garden and leave the flag-pin wearers to get on with it!