"Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves and the only way they could do this is by not voting."
Who can argue with making voting rights more practiced and truly voter-friendly?
Actually, no one should be able to argue against it. But depending on how red your state is, you're likely finding it harder and harder to cast a vote in this great free country. If you live the GOP-dominated South or the Midwest, voting can feel like passing a border checkpoint: Everything must match perfectly -- photo, address, complete name. Heaven help you if you recently married or if the Postal Service changed your address.
On the other hand, if you live in Washington, Oregon or Colorado -- all blue or purple states -- voting is not only easy, it's encouraged and welcomed.
This is especially true in Oregon, where new legislation signed into law this month by the state's new governor, Kate Brown, paves the way for the state to one day have close to 100 percent voter registration. The law uses the federal "motor voter" law and puts it into hyper-drive by registering people to vote when they obtain or renew a state driver's license or ID. Tennessee also allows new drivers to register to vote, but doesn't make the registration automatic.
The Oregon law, which is partially retroactive, dictates that residents interacting with the state's Department of Motor Vehicles become registered to vote if they aren't already. The registration will be provisional for 21 days, during which time applicants will be notified of their new status and be given a chance to become affiliated with a political party or to opt out of the voting process altogether.
But Oregon is the exception for making voting easy, not the rule.
Exactly half of our states have moved in the past five or 10 years to make it harder to vote.
Against a backdrop of the Supreme Court's ruling in 2013 to gut the Voting Rights Act and a coordinated GOP campaign to fight virtually nonexistent voter fraud, 25 states -- including Tennessee -- have adopted measures making it harder to vote. In fact, between 2011 and 2015, some 395 new voting restrictions have been introduced in 49 states, according to one recent report on MSNBC.
Last fall, Wisconsin's Republican and oft-mentioned presidential contender, Gov. Scott Walker, made it clear that he thinks potentially disenfranchising 300,000 legal and eligible voters is worth it to stop even one possibly fraudulent vote.
Conservative math is a strange thing, especially when you consider that one study of Wisconsin voters found that 0.00023 percent of votes are the product of fraud. Meanwhile, another study shows that Wisconsin's toughened law will prevent 2 to 3 percent of registered voters from casting a ballot and those disenfranchised are disproportionately likely to be racial minorities, low-income voters or students -- groups that tend to favor Democrats over Republicans. Data from the 2012 election found that African-American voters in Wisconsin were 1.7 times as likely as white voters to lack a matching driver's license or state ID and Latino voters in Wisconsin were 2.6 times as likely as white voters to lack these forms of identification.
In October, just weeks before Election Day, the U.S. Supreme Court put a temporary block on the implementation of the Wisconsin measure, which requires strict forms of government-issued ID. This week, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal on the law -- meaning it now goes into effect.
Requiring strict forms of government-issued photo ID sounds more reasonable and easy than it actually is.
Many elderly people have driver's licenses with no photos or have no driver's licenses at all. Further, many elderly people don't have birth certificates -- that all-important piece of paper that allows one to get a government-issued photo ID. A Medicare card and a Social Security card won't pass muster in the states with photo ID laws. Many young people move around often within their cities and counties. And a university student ID will only work if it includes a signature and proof of enrollment. All too often, jumping through the myriad bureaucratic hoops necessary to bypass these hardships requires many trips, many explanations and often considerable money.
Oddly, conservatives have had the same reaction to Oregon's new law that they had to President Obama's recent endorsement of "mandatory" voting. These same folks who so fear voting fraud -- especially if the voters are dark complected or young -- said their objection to the Oregon law is -- well, too much freedom. They say it's unconstitutional to force eligible Americans to register to vote if they don't want to. Oregon handles this with its "opt-out" provision.
In essence, Oregon flips pathetic voter turnouts on its head, and it's expected to register about 300,000 new voters in the state. Oh, and by the way, Oregon already had the most convenient voting system in the country because residents there can receive a ballot by mail two or three weeks before an election, giving them ample time to research issues or candidates. They can return their official ballot in a security envelope that they can drop off anytime before the polls close at official drop boxes across the state.
Oregon consistently ranks as one of the national leaders in voter turnout. In the 2014 midterms, for example, Oregon's turnout was 51 percent. Tennessee's was 28.6 percent, and Georgia's -- even with a hot governor's race -- was 38 percent.
But then Oregon is blue state, and its governor is a Democrat.