Professor Tokaji of the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University wrote a blog post on August 3rd in which he poked holes in the position of the right wing "voting rights" group previously taken on by Brad Friedman on his Brad Blog. (See http://fairnessbybeckerman.blogspot.com/2005/08/kudos-to-brad-blog-for-exposing-hitler.html)
Professor Takaji noted the disparate effect the group's suggested Photo ID law would have on the poor, Latinos, and African Americans, and compared it to the racist voting laws of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries:
"We should remember that, at the turn of the 20th Century, allegations of "good government" were used by white Democrats in a remarkably successful strategy to suppress the black vote. The result of those very successful efforts was to impose barriers like the literacy test, which excluded African Americans from voting throughout the South for the better part of the century, until after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. If you go back and read some of the documents from the late 1800's and early 1900's, as I've recently been doing, the similarity to the sort of arguments being advanced now in support of photo ID laws is frightening. It is beyond unfortunate to see the same sort of tactics, albeit dressed up in more respectable garb, being employed at the start of the 21st Century."
Professor Tokaji's post appears at http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/blogs/tokaji/2005/08/vote-suppression-fraud-and-photo-id.html
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