Why are they trying to block voting?
In Friday's PB, we saw a story that two republican legislators want to require photo id's for voting. State reps. Tom Emmer and Joe Hoppe have proposed requiring these photo id's without legitimate impetus - they do not allege there is a problem with people voting who shouldn't be.
The only problem the GOP might have with voting in our state for the last two years is that democrats are winning. Every special election in the state over the last year was taken by democrats - the most recent pair being Larry Hawes, and Tarryl Clark,.
It is well known that Olmsted County with an unbelievable percentage of voters participating, nearing 90%, elected 2 democrats for the first time since 1973. So, are Mr. Emmer and Mr. Hoppe addressing this problem?
It's conventional wisdom among political scientists that low turnout helps republicans. So that might be Emmer and Hoppe's impetus. But even that conventional wisdom is getting turned on its ear. As mentioned before the democrats have won every special election this year, and special elections have 1/10th the turnout of general elections.
Democrats are responding that the election process is not by any means broken, that in fact, we should be proud of our level of participation and how clean our elections are. “I don’t think there is a problem,” says Brian Melendez, the DFL party chair. “I don’t understand why we’d come up with a problem that would drive down turnout and prevent people from voting.” According to KSTP.
