Contributed by Charles Samuelson, ED of the ACLU-MN
Recently, We Want Voter ID, an organization that is a collection of groups supporting voter id (including Minnesota Majority), published a cartoon illustrating their position on voter ID by depicting a line of people waiting to vote. The people standing in line included: 2 characters in Halloween Costumes, an African American prison inmate, and 1 Hispanic (demarcated by a sombrero). The alleged purpose of the cartoon is to show how easy it is committ voter fraud in Minnesota. The group We want Voter ID's real goal is to make it more difficult for Minnesotans to vote and to immediately reduce the number of registered voters by 200,000+.
The cartoon clearly reveals that their rationale for voter id as racially motivated. Other groups, who are our allies in the Voter ID fight, have condemned this cartoon as clearly racist and have demanded it be taken down. This morning they changed the cartoon by taking out the Latino & African American, but added the caption "politically correct version for the hypersensitive," despite earlier statements that they did not believe it to be racist and that this was merely "race baiting".
The American Civil Liberties Union believes in the marketplace of ideas and we believe that the antidote to bad speech is more speech. For more than 90 years we have backed up this principle by defending the rights of people to promote ideas we find despicable (Nazi's, KKK, etc). So it is with this group.
They should be allowed to keep this drivel in the public eye because everyone should be able to see their ideas for what they are. And everyone should keep talking about it because that is the only way that the truth will ever be made clear.
Read more about what we are doing to oppose voter ID.
(Taken from the opening screen of We Want Voter ID's webpage before they changed it)