The group Tennessee Citizen Action sends a follow-up video from the former Marine who challenged the new state law requiring you to show photo ID at the polls. Instead of going after a poll worker, this time Tim Thompson makes his pitch to the camera:
What we should do is vote these people out of office, that put this law in effect. Because they don’t have our rights in the best interest. They don’t have the American people’s rights in the best interest. If they want to put the condition on our rights, that’s not justice. That’s not what we voted them into office for. We voted them into office to take care of our rights, to protect our rights. If they continue passing these laws, we need to continue to vote them out of office and change it. That’s what we need to do. And we can do that. We can make a difference if we join together, both parties, both sides, we’ve got to fight this. We’ve got to make it happen. And we can make it happen.
Personally, I think his appeal for a bipartisan end to obstacles for voting could be tough to pull out, but he’s onto something with the idea that it’s about rights. Voting is a right. He’s proposing democracy as a fix for curbing democracy.
We'll have more on this tonight, but for now you might read this from the Houston Chronicle. Texas has a new voter ID law that's under review by the federal Justice Department. If the law got approved, the Houston paper calculates, nearly one in five Texas voters would become ineligible. In Texas, heavily Hispanic counties would experience the effect most, but it's not just about race. "This is a disguise -- smoke and mirrors for a poll tax for the elderly and the disabled, regardless of the race, and for those who are dependent on public transportation," State Sen. Mario Gallegos tells the paper. "We're going back to the Jim Crow days."