Open the polls

Regarding John Diaz’s “Against the wind of voter suppression” (Insight, Aug. 30): The editorial purports to discuss voter suppression, but Diaz ends by opining that automatic registration of drivers in California might not amend voter apathy. These issues are not remotely connected.

Suppression of the vote — Florida, in advance of Bush vs. Gore, for example — gives an unelected group like the Supreme Court the opportunity to skew the popular mandate to its party’s choice. Just imagine what this does in countless local elections in those states where voter suppression is now rampant and winked at by that same Supreme Court.

The “he said, she said” account of Democrats’ preference for open polls and Republicans’ preference for narrow participation is blandly evenhanded. Diaz doesn’t mention the near absence of in-person voter fraud or the enormous disenfranchisement that results from restrictive voter ID laws in certain, largely Republican controlled states.

Opening the vote might not improve participation, but suppression of certain target voter groups (students, people of color, the poor) certainly discourages it and helps the party that controls the vote. The same was true for Jim Crow voter restrictions in the Dixiecrat South. That’s the greater social issue the editorial should have addressed. The answer is certainly to open the polls as widely as possible, nationwide, to leave the responsibility to the voting public, and not those who try to manage the poll to their party’s advantage. Once the doors are wide open, we can encourage all to pass through to vote. That’s another question entirely.

James Cummings, San Francisco