Voter ID

In a recent Dallas Morning News editorial entitled “Texas makes a case against Voter ID”, the author (unknown) discusses the issue of whether or not Texans should be made to provide some form of voter identification before casting their votes at the polls, and chooses to defend the opposition.  To begin his argument, the author brings the audience up to date on the most recent debate over the Texas voter ID laws, and reminds everyone that “The importance of this case extends beyond our borders because Texas and other Republican-controlled states are also bent on challenging the Voting Rights Act.”  By doing this, the author attempts to prevent less informed readers from quickly moving on to another article that they believe to be more important, or one that they know more about. Then, the author presents his argument that “the [Voter ID] law is injurious to democracy”, followed by a few points of evidence. According to one of his sources, a statistician from the University of Texas at Austin, an estimated 167,724 registered voters would be disenfranchised if the law were to go into effect, which hypothetically, according to the author, would be the “equivalent of denying the vote to every person in Grand Prairie or in Brownsville”. Furthermore, he mentions that most of those that would be affected are minorities, and that this could be seen as intentional discrimination against those in this demographic. To conclude, “Voting is a right”, according to the author, “and citizens should be skeptical of any measure that broadly impedes participation”, and there are ways to safeguard the electoral process without denying thousands of registered voters the right vote. It is made apparent that the author is anti-Republican on this issue, as he points out that they are the ones that are pushing to pass this law, but he does go about providing a counter argument respectfully and even provides somewhat of an acceptable middle ground that voters could agree on. Finally, by providing just enough information as to persuade the audience, and by making it more realistic through an analogy, the author formulated a fairly solid case and has me leaning slightly towards his side.