Posted 9:00 AM by Scoobie Davis

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Timothy Noah asks supposedly principled conservatives why thye don't denounce voter suppression efforts.  Here's one of the more thoughtful insights from the comments section:

It's curious that while the conservatives are excoriating Obama for wanting to introduce European-style "socialism," their anti-voter fraud laws assume that the demography and social environment in the U.S. is like the Netherlands or somewhere. You just pop down your nearest office a few streets away and hey presto!

There are a lot of parts of this country that are geographically remote, in which people don't have a car, in which public transit is sparse or non-existent, in which many people only have a high-school education at the most, in which they may not have standard documentation of birth etc, where they aren't following the news every day, and so on. In the South in particular, this can be a situation in which both blacks and whites find themselves, but blacks are more likely to sense (rightly or wrongly) that the system is against them.

One could accept the legitimacy of the laws more readily if it was obvious that there was also a bona-fide attempt to get IDs to people who need one.