Florida's New Jim Crow Law

Many decades ago there were a set of laws around the Southern states known as Jim Crow laws, designed to keep African-Americans from exercising their rights as American citizens. Chief among these were the voting laws, which set up a series of barriers from literacy requirements to identification restrictions to poll taxes in order to prevent people from voting.

Ah, you say, but Jim Crow's dead, right?

Wrong, dear reader.

The Florida Legislature (with a Republican majority, imagine that!) set up a new voting law that requires a specific set of ID requirements "to discourage voter fraud." See, the great bugaboo that enables people to disenfranchise others is the idea that people might try to game the system by stuffing the ballot box or bring in ringers or register dead people to vote.

All quite usual tricks, if you follow American history.

However, laws like Florida's (which have also popped up in Georgia, Ohio, New Mexico, etc.) seem to specifically target minorities and the elderly, who might not be able to fulfill the new requirements in order to be able to vote.

Why these groups specifically?

Why, these groups might just vote Democratic, you see, and if enough of them get registered and vote, it might just change the political landscape in Florida. Hell, some of the GOP majority (like the crazier-than-a-bat-on-meth House Speaker, Marco Rubio) might lose their cushy jobs.

Florida might even - gasp! - go to Obama in the Presidential election. And the GOP can't have that, no sir.