A bill introduced by Republicans Wednesday would not allow IDs from Wisconsin counties and towns to be used as valid forms of identification in elections. Obviously, Wisconsin Republicans are just enforcing the principle that voting is a privilege, not a right.
This bill was introduced by state Sen. Van Wanggaard, R-Racine and Rep. Joe Sanfelippo, R-New Berlin. They said the bill was introduced to cut down on fraud and confusion, as voter fraud is a major issue. In the general elections between 2000 and 2010, more than 649 million votes were cast and, in that time, there were an outstanding number of 13 confirmed instances of voter fraud.
Those 13 votes could have changed the course each general election. To solve this problem, we should do what freedom-fighting politicians truly want: abandon voting rights.
I hear the Constitution protects certain “rights.” One of these “rights” is voting. But that wasn’t always the case.
In the good ol’ America, someone had to own property to vote. The crazy liberal Americans of the early 19th century decided that people without property could vote. From then on, voting as we know it has increasingly become polluted by the common man.
The return to voting being a privilege has been a gradual one. Starting in 2011 with the photo ID law, Wisconsin has been the leader in taking the voting right away. The 2011 bill has disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of people lacking the proper ID.
That disenfranchisement is not good enough. Still, an estimated 2.5 million Wisconsinites voted in the 2014 gubernatorial election. That’s a 56.5 percent turnout rate, and it’s frankly unacceptable.
We suffer in this country of low trust in our government, and minimizing the participation of the masses in government would have the positive, unintended benefit of raising the confidence in the government.
How? Good question. As less people vote, government has to be accountable to less people, so the voting population gets their needs addressed. And since there’s such a small group of voters and leaders, they can just feed propaganda to the rest of us, thus making us happy with the state of the state.
Since we can’t use poll taxes or literacy tests to weed out the masses because of the Constitution, more creative measures must be used.
Wisconsinites that are deserving of the ballot should memorize the Apple iTunes agreement. Showing that amount of fortitude and dedication is the lifeblood of the American democratic experience.
Aaron Reilly ([email protected]) is a freshman majoring in comparative literature and Russian.
