>If there has been enough voter fraud to justify disenfranchising as much as 10% of the population, it should be easy enough to prove it- and even to take action to assist those you risk disenfranchising so it doesn't look as if two wrongs are supposed to make a right.

Good point. Seems to me that this should be similar to the issue of risking freeing many guilty so as not to allow even one innocent to be jailed. In the same way, we should be willing to risk many fraudulent votes so as not to disenfranchise even one legitimate voter. (And, of course, there is little or no evidence of widespread fraud of a sort that the ID laws would prevent.)

>Seems to me that not everybody here has experienced a community poor enough that even ID is an optional extra. Keep disenfranchising and squashing them down and one day they will decide they have nothing to lose, at which point it will not be an ID they use to assert themselves.

I wonder whether the POV difference among people here is at least partly about whether they or those close to them have been oppressed in recent memory. There's no question that my mother's liberalism grew out of her WWII experiences. OTOH, my father's family has been liberal for generations, so maybe not such a good theory. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordecai_Ezekiel was my father's uncle.)

Tamar