[EL] Madison (WI) new law this week requiring landlords to distribute voter reg forms

[Joe La Rue]

I laugh aloud at the silly progressives, like those who issued this press release, who assert that Republicans push for voter ID is un-American and a war on voting. What rhetoric! And what complete nonsense. 

This supposes that placing sensible restrictions on who can vote is contrary to our American values. Yet we've always had such restrictions. The Founders created a system in which many states allowed only property owners to vote. Were the Founders un-American? Today, in every state and federal election, only those 18 and older may vote, and only those who live in the jurisdiction in question may vote. Are we all un-American for those requirements?

In this age in which we have some 12 million people in our country illegally and therefore ineligible to vote, Republicans are trying to institute a common sense safeguard. Requiring voter ID helps assure only citizens cast ballots. Efforts to block voter ID only frustrate that goal. Perhaps that's the true progressive end game: perhaps they want non-citizens to be able to vote. Regardless, their fight against common sense voter ID laws makes it more likely that some will.

Contrary to progressive claims, Republicans aren't trying to keep minorities from voting. Unlike progressives, we believe minority citizens are smart and capable and certainly not too stupid to figure out how to get an ID if they don't already have one. In short, we Republicans believe minority race citizens are just as capable as white people and so do not need to be coddled. Progressives, though, have such a low view of minorities that they cannot imagine them having the intelligence and capability to acquire IDs, and instead insist that ID laws will disenfranchise them. I, for one, abhor that type of prejudice.

On Jul 18, 2012, at 11:35 PM, Dan Johnson <dan at kchrlaw.com> wrote:

> Innovative news on the voter registration front (the attack back in the War on Voting continues)...
> 
> From: Progressive Advocacy <dan at ProgressivePublicAffairs.com>
> Date: July 18, 2012 7:14:51 PM CDT
> To: dan at ProgressivePublicAffairs.com
> Subject: Progressive Advocacy
> 
> Progressive Advocacy 
>  
> Madison WI and Washington State attack back on the war on voting
> Posted: 17 Jul 2012 10:45 PM PDT
> Fantastic news.
> 
> Progressive state and local governments are attacking back on the Republican's anti-American war on voting by implementing forward-thinking laws and policies that reduce the barriers between citizens and their ballots.
> 
> Yesterday, the Madison (WI) City Council passed an ordinance adding the voter registration form to the pile of paper documents that landlords must distribute to tenants when they move in. This is now law, just in time for the August move-in for UW-Madison students. Half the housing units in Madison are rental units and a large percentage of those units turn over every year.
> 
> As Alder Bridget Maniaci, the lead sponsor of the proposal explains, providing voter registration information to citizens when they move into a new place makes sense, since that's when people are changing their address (and they are probably unaware that they must proactively tell some obscure unit of local government they have moved in order to vote months later). From the Isthmus:
> 
> 
> The way citizens in the United States vote is based on where they live, Maniaci adds, which means it is sensible to provide them with voting information when they change addresses.
> "To provide to tenants voter registration forms at the time they move in, when most individuals are in the process of changing all of their other household information, everything from Netflix to their post-office address to the DMV, that's a very natural time to do this," she says.
> As a bonus, getting citizens to register to vote early is cheaper for the city clerk to process than registering people in the crunch leading up to the election, so distributing these voter registration forms will save taxpayers some money.
> 
> On the West Coast, Washington State's Secretary of State is unveiling an app that will allow users to register to vote through Facebook. Since Washington State already uses online voter registration, pulling the data from a user's Facebook account and importing it into the voter registration program will make it easier for people to register -- and people can tell their friends about how they registered to vote, creating more of a social norm of democratic self-governance through participation.
> 
> Congratulations to Washington and Madison (named after two Founding Fathers, coincidentally) for further implementing the great democratic spirit of our American Republic.
> 
> 
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