Voter ID Update: Voter ID laws Discussed on Colbert Report and Hardball

As we've been reporting here at Campus Progress, state "Voter ID" laws have gained more and more traction in the press, and last night both Stephen Colbert and Chris Matthews commented on the laws on their respective shows.

On The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert calls out Republican legislators who have falsely claimed that there is widespread voting fraud. He derides Ohio for passing a Voter ID law despite the fact that just four instances of fraud were found out of the more than 9 million votes cast in the 2002 and 2004 elections. He also points out that many people do not have the type of ID card necessary to vote under these new laws, and mocks Texas’ law which allows people to vote using personal handgun licenses but not student IDs, as well as South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley’s declaration that she would drive everyone in her state that didn’t have a drivers license to the DMV herself.

Here’s the clip:

Hardball with Chris Matthews also ran a segment on the issue last night. The show, which has covered the issue before, concluded with Matthews blasting Voter ID bills:

“If you live in a big city like New York or Philadelphia and some of the really dense downtown neighborhoods, you don’t own a car and you don’t drive. So not everybody has driver’s licenses, it’s as simple as that. So they don’t have these government ID cards, and that’s just a fact… I just think it’s odd that you can vote if you have a gun license but you can’t use a student ID card. Things like that seem discriminatory to me in favor of the second amendment types, and certainly discriminatory against college kids.”

Check it out:

The American Legislative Exchange Council has also received more and more press lately for its part in Voter ID laws. ALEC’s role in distributing model legislation to state legislatures, which was first reported by Campus Progress, was covered in a piece in Bloomberg today and the Huffington Post yesterday. The Bloomberg piece exposes ALEC’s expanding reach in state politics, and criticizes the group as an “opportunity for corporations to become co-authors of state laws.” The Huffington Post takes it one step further, writing that “ALEC's purpose is to pass laws that enrich corporate profits and investor returns by starving the government of revenue, rigging elections and busting unions.”

Jeffrey Boxer is an intern with Campus Progress.

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