John Oliver’s show “Last Week Tonight” returned Sunday to illustrate the hypocrisy in voter ID laws, which critics say disproportionately affect black and Latino voters.
“Voter impersonation fraud is incredibly rare,” Oliver said.
In 14 years, there were 31 possible instances out of more than a billion ballots cast, according to Oliver, yet, one of the reasons for strict voter identification laws cited by conservative lawmakers in South Carolina was a need to stop dead people from voting in elections.
As Oliver’s team found, there is no real basis for for the fear: Only five ballots of more than 1.3 million ballots cast cast could not be accounted for in South Carolina’s 2012 election.
“This is the biggest overreaction to a manageable problem since Sleeping Beauty’s father ordered all the spinning wheels in the land to be burned,” Oliver said. “This is an agrarian economy, we need those spinning wheels! Why don’t you just watch you daughter for one day in her fucking life?”
Watch the video via HBO:
I’m so glad he is back from hiatus!
Brilliant - and, of course, John Oliver is right on the money. Voter ID laws are a solution looking for a problem (and Republicans, with the endorsement of the Supreme Court, hope this will be a way to further influence the outcome of elections)
It’s obvious these laws are only meant to harm people who may vote for Democrats. But they also are great examples of general problems in todays GOP:
It is not possible for them to see the world through another person’s eyes. That’s why so many times when something tragic happens to one of them they suddenly support something they spent years fighting because it is not possible for them to understand that what just happened to them happens to many other people every day.
Because requirement to show ID is much more effective in preventing dead people from voting than they fact that they’re, you know, dead.
When the NC senate leader was asked why we need voter ID laws considering the lack of evidence of voter fraud, his answer was that the lack of evidence proved how successful the fraud was.