In response to challenges to voter-ID laws, some letter writers in the Duluth News Tribune and Star Tribune have recently asserted that voting is a privilege, not a right.
Minnesota House Speaker Kurt Zellers said in a radio show that voting is a privilege, not a right: Eric Roper, Hot Dish Politics, Star Tribune, 2011-04-21. Roper pointed out that several amendments to the Constitution refer to voting as a right. Roper also pointed out that Zellers did later take back his remarks and state that voting is a right. Unfortunately, over a year later many of his co-religionists (oops, I mean fellow travelers) still hold to his remarks.
On the other hand, Attorney General Eric Holder stated that voting is a right: "What we're talking here is a constitutional right. This is not a privilege. The right to vote is something that fundamentally defines who we are as Americans." See http://www.rippdemup.com/2012/03/eric-holder-on-voter-id-laws-voting-is-a-constitutional-right-and-not-a-privilege/ which also has a link to an interview with Holder on NBC Nightly News.
What many supporters of voter ID laws ignore is that the American Revolution was mainly about the right to govern ourselves. "Ourselves" was originally defined as white, male, property owners, but has slowly expanded to include all adult citizens. If we can't vote, how do we govern ourselves? Will we revert to the paternalistic idea of the Federalists that disinterested aristocrats would be the governing elite? Will we become a country governed by the self-interested large corporations, the funders of much of the push for the "conservative" agenda?
If voting is a privilege, who is granting that privilege? Currently it is the government that organizes voting. If this organization creates the privilege, then does government give the privilege only to those who support it? It seems to me that the only thing "conservative" about "conservatives" is conserving their power over the rest of us.
