Polarized Voting Persuasive Essay

Election season is in full swing in the United States, the time of year in which many people wish they could go on a months-long vacation to somewhere they wouldn’t have to watch local television, listen to local radio or check their mailboxes… Be that as it may, as a judge once reminded me, there are only two ways in which a citizen of my country actually participates in governing him- or her-self: jury duty and the ballot box.

In a country that, pundits tell us, is becoming more and more polarized every day, voter identification laws have become one more point of polarization. More than thirty U. S. States have passed such laws in recent years, most patterned on a sample bill that came out of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

While proponents cannot provide evidence that such fraud exists, they point to historical evidence (sometimes anecdotal) of instances of this chicanery. “Dead people voting in Chicago” is one such bogeyman, while a potentially more realistic example is the first election win by a Texas congressman named Lyndon Johnson. In an era of electronic voting, however, it seems fairly unlikely that anyone is going to steal and destroy a ballot box from a precinct filled with the “wrong”

S. passport, or a U. S. military ID; all of which must be current or have expired in the past 60 days; or a U. S. citizenship certificate. Very visibly missing is state-issued student identification, an omission opponents of the law claim to be proof positive that the law is intended to suppress young voters. Many students, while tax-paying residents of the state who are contributing tens of thousands of dollars to the local economy every year, maintain their vehicle registration and driver’s license at their permanent address. Texas is happy to take their tuition, room and board, however the state apparently does not want them voting