On Wednesday, March 18th, President Obama spoke at the City Club of Cleveland where he brought up the idea of mandatory voting.
"If everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map in this country," Obama said, calling it potentially transformative. Not only that, Obama said, but universal voting would "counteract money more than anything."
This sounds like a wonderful idea since voting is a right that every American citizen has, but not to everyone.
On Fox News' Happening Now, host Jon Scott wondered what Obama meant when he said mandatory voting would "change the political map." He opined that since there are more registered Democrats in the country, Obama was trying to stack the deck. However, Fortune Magazine and Fox News' political analyst Nina Easton went totally off the rails and made some very shocking remarks about voting ID laws.
Scott: is he talking about putting more Democrats in power - there are more registered Democrats in this country than Republicans, so if you make voting mandatory, presumably you get more Democrat politicians.
Easton: Sure, and don't we love something that should be an honor in a democracy becoming a mandate from Washington. How great is that?
Most Americans believe voting is a right (or birthright) of being a citizen of America and not an honor that was bestowed upon them, but then she really dug into the weeds of racial voting rights.
Easton: ..but this is based on two canards that his president cited in that same speech. One is that quote, as he puts it some folks prevent people from voting, which of course is a reference to voter ID laws in states. It's ridiculous that people don't have ID's to vote. You have to have an ID to work. You have to have an ID to check into a doctor's office and by this continued argument that you shouldn't have an ID is just ghettoizing some people.
I won't get into all the available data that shows how Voter ID laws hurt voter turnout, especially in the middle and lower classes because Easton is an excellent author and knows better, but I never expected Nina to racialize the argument against voter ID in this manner. Using the term "ghettoizing" as she did means of course she's blasting all the silly brown people.
Discuss below....
