Kevin Drum makes the usual argument… [1]
VOTER ID….The State of Indiana has the most stringent voter ID laws in the country. Democrats are always griping about this, and have even gone so far as to challenge Indiana’s law in the Supreme Court. But this is just silly. In this day and age everyone has a photo ID anyway, so what’s the problem?
Just in case, though, the Washington Institute for the Study of Ethnicity and Race [2] decided to check and see if this was really true. The three charts reproduced here illustrate the guts of their findings. By a substantial margin, the Indiana residents most likely to possess photo ID turn out to be whites, the middle aged, and high-income voters. And while this is undoubtedly just a wild coincidence, these are also the three groups most like to vote for Republicans. (2006 exit poll data here [3] for the suspicious.) Overall, 91% of registered Republicans had photo IDs compared to only 83% of registered Democrats.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We know… those wascalwy Wepubwicans are all wasicsts.
But should we also mention, Kevin, that the reverse is also true.. those most likely to be voting illegally, and gaming the system (As we saw in Philly, where several precincts had more people voting Democrat than the total number of people registered to vote… and particularly those getting paid to do so) are mostly non-white, usually quite young, and Democrat?
I’m sure you had no idea….
BBCT: Memeorandum