GOP Voter ID Laws Seek to Disenfranchise Millenials

It is not just blacks and other racial minorities that Republican law makers seek to bar from voting.  Another targeted group?  Millennials who are far less likely to support failed and bigoted GOP policies.  Particularly, GOP platforms on voodoo economics and homophobia.  It's a sad indication of how low the GOP has sunk when one of its main plans for winning elections is to bar as many citizens as possible from voting.  The Washington Post looks at how Millenials are being targeted by the party of ignorance and bigotry.  Here are highlights:

First they came for blacks, and we said nothing. Then they came for Latinos, poor people and married women, and we again ignored the warning signs.

Now, after our years of apathy, they’re coming for us: the nation’s millennials.

Across the country, Republican state policymakers have hoisted barriers to voting by passing voter-ID laws and curtailing electoral accommodations such as same-day registration and early voting. These policy changes are allegedly intended to eradicate the imagined scourge of voter fraud, but the real point seems to be voter suppression.

For a time, the targeted populations were primarily racial, ethnic and income groups that traditionally vote Democratic. Now they happen to include Gen-Y’ers, more specifically my college-age brethren. We millennials may be fickle in our loyalties, generally distrustful of government institutions and unaligned with any political party, but our generation’s motley, liberal-to-libertarian-leaning ideological preferences still threaten red-state leadership. 

In response, Republicans have set out to erect creative, if potentially unconstitutional, Tough-Mudder-style obstacle courses along our path to the polls. 

Last year in Ohio, for example, Republican legislators proposed a measure that would effectively strip hundreds of millions of dollars from state schools if they continued to provide students paying out-of-state tuition with the paperwork necessary to register to vote in the state (as courts have said college students are legally allowed to do). 

In Maine, the secretary of state investigated 200 university students for voter fraud; he found no evidence of wrongdoing but then sent a threatening letter telling them that they must either obtain a Maine driver’s license and register their vehicles or cancel their state voter registrations. In Texas, photo identification is required to vote and, while concealed handgun licenses count, state-school-issued student IDs don’t.

North Carolina’s efforts have been particularly aggressive, perhaps because young people represent an especially threatening voting bloc to the Republicans in control there. Without the strong turnout of young voters in 2008, after all, Barack Obama would not have become the first Democratic presidential candidate in more than two decades to carry the Tar Heel state.

Like other states, North Carolina has eliminated many accommodations disproportionately used by young people and other first-time voters, such as same-day registration, and instituted voter-ID requirements that don’t recognize student IDs. 

If Paris Hilton, 50 Cent and Madonna can’t convince young people to vote, maybe a bunch of old white men trying to bar their path will do the job.