Having worked overtime to disenfranchise poor and black voters in 2012, and lost the White House anyway, the Republican Party is trying to figure out who else it can prevent from voting in the future.
The answer is easy: women.
And the place is urgent: Texas, where pro-choice heroine Wendy Davis stands a reasonable chance of success in her run for governor.
The strategy is simple: adjust voting laws so that votes must produce a photo ID with their current leal name. This reasonable-sounding rule in fact disenfranchises a surprising number of women -- as many as 34% of them. Young women, apparently, don't rush to update their driver's licenses after they are married.
Jean Anne Esselink, writing at The New Civil Rights Movement, sums it up:
You have to hand it to Texas. Abortion politics threaten to drive the election for governor, so they have figured out a way to discourage a large group of women who are likely have a personal interest in the issue of choice: married women of child-bearing age. Women who might favor Wendy Davis.Yeah. We actually think it's that simple.
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