Those seeking to remedy the real problems in voting rights and the obvious examples of election fraud (wholesale efforts to manipulate entire elections) might feel like abandoning all hope when they enter the Supreme Court of the United States. One of the very worst decisions in recent history was handed down by the court in an ACLU law suit challenging Indiana's restrictive photographic identification law.
There is ample evidence that the purpose of the Indiana photo ID law, the prevention of the phantom crime of voter fraud, would curb turnout in that state. But the court persevered and hypothesized that they'd actually found some real evidence. What was the evidence that was so compelling that it resulted in sanctioning photo ID laws in all fifty states? See this extended note from "Polite Fascism Contracts the Right to Vote"
There is one obvious question from all of this:
How do you work in a system with people who deny the reality of what happens on Election Day? What does it say about an elections system that perseverates on the "voter" fraud fiction for decades in the repeated absence of any evidence to substantiate that fraud?
There are serious problems with elections in the United States: voter suppression; felon disenfranchisement; unsecured computerized voting on invisible ballots; vote counting conducted in secret; a billion dollars spent on campaigns; and few if any real issues discussed in a serious fashion. These and other manifest problems should be the focus, not a contrivance based on a fiction.
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Many thanks to Suzanne Ito for her very helpful comments on this article
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