Since I used to be a county organizer for ACORN/Project Vote, I have first-hand experience with the challenges people in our inner cities have providing the documentation they need to get hired for a simple job like going out on the street and trying to get people to register to vote. Photo ID requirements for voting create the same set of challenges. In the state of Wisconsin, the subject of the Frank v. Walker Supreme Court case, more than 300,000 registered voters currently lack the required identification documents.

This is a subset of registered voters which represents 9% of the total registered electorate in the Badger State. These are people who could vote in previous elections but won’t be able to vote in future ones unless they get state-approved ID. Then there is another subset of unregistered voters who won’t be able to cast their votes without first getting a state-approved ID. Getting that ID may require them to take extra steps like replacing a lost birth certificate or Social Security card. Through a combination of expense, hassle, lack of information, and insufficient motivation, we should expect tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of Wisconsinites to be shut out of the election process in 2016 if the Supreme Court upholds the state’s voter ID law.

That this group of future non-voters is browner and poorer than the electorate at-large, is the entire point of the legislation.

Meanwhile, though the state tries to justify its voter ID law as necessary to prevent voter fraud at the polls, after two years of investigations, Wisconsin “could not point to a single instance of known voter impersonation occurring in Wisconsin at any time in the recent past.”

But the Supreme Court is unlikely to care. They didn’t care seven years ago when they upheld Indiana’s voter ID law in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board.

As a plurality of the Supreme Court admitted in Crawford, the record in that case contained “no evidence” of in-person voter fraud occurring “in Indiana at any time in its history.” Indeed, the Court’s plurality opinion was only able to cite a single example of such fraud occurring in the United States within the preceding 140 years! Yet the Court upheld Indiana’s law regardless.

The conclusion is obvious. The conservative bloc on the Supreme Court supports laws that have no other purpose than to make it easier for Republicans to win elections by making sure that fewer Democrats can vote.

That’s the kind of country we’re living in, and if those voters happen to be disproportionately black and brown, that’s just they’re own fault for provoking conservatives with their socialistic political beliefs.

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