Planned Parenthood organizations fund opposition to Minnesota Voter ID

There is a disconnect here.   Planned Parenthood of Minnesota, South Dakota and North Dakota are mobilizing and raising funds against the Minnesota voter ID amendment.  I guess Planned Parenthood from the entire region has successfully ensured that everyone is getting their free or government subsidized contraception or health care.  Now they can now move on to the really important issues involving women’s health – photo ID. 

According to this Planned Parenthood office in Iowa, you need a photo ID for payment of services.  

Planned Parenthood organizations fund opposition to Minnesota Voter ID

There is a disconnect here.   Planned Parenthood of Minnesota, South Dakota and North Dakota are mobilizing and raising funds against the Minnesota voter ID amendment.  I guess Planned Parenthood from the entire region has successfully ensured that everyone is getting their free or government subsidized contraception or health care.  Now they can now move on to the really important issues involving women’s health – photo ID. 

According to this Planned Parenthood office in Iowa, you need a photo ID for payment of services.  

Section 5 “now facilitates the very discrimination it was designed to prevent”


 


In an essay for SCOTUSblog’s Online Voting Rights Act Symposium, the Cato Institute’s Ilya Shapiro argues persuasively that

Section 5 was a valuable tool in the fight against systemic disenfranchisement, but it now facilitates the very discrimination it was designed to prevent…  


 


[T]he VRA’s success has undermined its continuing viability; courts and legislatures struggle mightily and often fruitlessly to satisfy both Section 5’s race-based mandate and the Fifteenth Amendment’s equal treatment guarantee.  These difficulties – constitutional, statutory, and practical – disadvantage candidates and voters, and undermine the VRA’s legacy of vindicating the voting rights of all citizens.


 


In sum, the Voting Rights Act has served its purpose but is now outmoded and unworkable.  Section 5 in particular causes tremendous federalism and equal protection problems, all while enforcing arbitrary standards that conflict with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and with Section 2.  As Justice Thomas wrote in NAMUDNO, an acknowledgment of Section 5’s unconstitutionality “represents a fulfillment of the Fifteenth Amendment’s promise of full enfranchisement and honors the success achieved by the VRA.”


 


The Court has two excellent opportunities to address these conflicts in the upcoming term, Nix v. Holder and Shelby County v. Holder.


 

Louisiana’s compromise on photo ID

Link to story:  

Louisiana Secretary of State Tom Schedler said Louisiana residents may vote without presenting a photo ID. Voters who either don’t have a photo ID or lost a driver’s license on Election Day are able to sign an affidavit with an on-site election commissioner and vote.

“Most people come in with a photo ID, and that’s the end of it,” Schedler said during a phone interview Friday. “The magic wand that Louisiana has over these other states with voter ID laws is that we think we hit a middle-ground approach to it.”

After the 2008 presidential election, Schedler’s office found an average of only 23 voters in each of the state’s parishes used the sworn affidavit rather than a photo ID to cast a ballot.