Beware -- Political Rant!

I try to stray from talking about politics here. This is supposed to be fun robot-cyborg related nonsense. However, I thought I would stray from that for a bit to talk about all this voter ID nonsense.

Recently, our governor vetoed a $23 million voter ID bill. This bill would cost $23 million to implement, and probably have quite a bit of continuing cost to get around the 24th Amendment to our US Constitution.

AMENDMENT XXIV

Passed by Congress August 27, 1962. Ratified January 23, 1964.

Section 1.
The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay poll tax or other tax.

Section 2.
The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

You see, in order to require a VoterID, you are constitutionally bound give them away. There is no getting around it. None. Further, I would argue, that you must give them away to everybody. The 24th does not single out poor people. You cannot tax anyone to allow them to vote.

Further, a good lawyer (or even a mediocre one) could argue that time is money. Thus, minimizing the time required to obtain such a photo ID would also be an imperative. The lines at the DMV are prohibitively long now. This would need to be rectified. It could be argued that it would still be a tax.

So, it would cost $23 million + whatever hundreds of millions of dollars to fight it in court just to lose. It is clearly a violation of the 24th Amendment no matter how much you frame it. It is clearly an attempt to abridge the voting rights of a certain segment of the population that do not vote Republican. It is that plain and simple.

These measures have been floating around different states for a while. It will not be long before they are struck down. There is a lot of time and effort going into them. Lots of tax dollars implementing them. There will be lots of upset people when they are all struck down -- at additional taxpayer's expense. Way to be fiscally conservative Republicans!

And all of this time and taxpayer expense solves what problem exactly?