The new wave of Republican restrictions on voter
registration and actual voting may seem like an academic issue to many folks, but
for the poor, it’s real and it’s a knockout.
WashingtonPost.com reports that even something as seemingly
mundane as getting a photo ID can be painfully expensive for folks at the lower
end of the socio-economic scale who are least likely to have one already.
A Harvard Law School study estimates the cost of obtaining
an ID ranges from $75 to $175, when you add up all fees, travel/parking costs,
lost pay from taking time off from the job….
If you’re living paycheck-to-paycheck, or living with no
paycheck at all, that kind of expense can make it effectively impossible to get
the ID needed to vote.
By the way, the infamous Jim Crow poll tax that was finally
invalidated by the Supreme Court in 1966 was only $1.50 (about $11 in current
dollars).
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2014
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