What is Arkansas like?

An 1865 ruling in favor of Confederate soldiers just protected the vote for minorities in Arkansas. What do you think of this?

• This week, in a widely noted move, the Arkansas Supreme Court unanimously invalidated a state voter ID law on the grounds that it added a qualification to those already laid out in the Arkansas constitution. Professor John Pagan of the University of Richmond Law School pointed out to me Thursday that in reaching its decision in Martin, the Arkansas Supreme Court of 2014 relied on an 1865 case called Rison v. Farr, also decided by the state Supreme Court. Rison was decided when the pro-Union legislature of Arkansas tried to disenfranchise former Confederate soldiers who, after the war, refused to swear an oath declaring that they had stopped fighting for the Confederacy on April 18, 1864—a year before the Civil War ended. [T]he Arkansas Supreme Court relied on a post–Civil War case restoring the franchise to former Confederate soldiers, including some who had slaughtered former slaves, to strike down a new voter ID law that would have suppressed the vote of minorities. Or as Pagan put it in an email: My great-great grandfather, who served in an Arkansas regiment of the Confederate Army from 1861-65, was disenfranchised under the 1864 statute held unconstitutional in Rison. That the restoration of his voting rights by judicial decision in 1865 should provide the constitutional basis for preventing the disenfranchisement of enslaved people’s descendants in 2014 has to be one of the most remarkable turnabouts in the legal history of the South. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2014/10/arkansas_voter_id_decision_based_on_a_civil_war_case_that_protected_confederate.html

• Answer:

  A pat on the back for the lawyer that did his homework. The voter ID laws are a novel,approach but they won't work in reducing voter fraud. Voter registration is rarely vetted allowing one person to register and vote under 5 different names in 5 different precincts. ID's can be had at any flee market and anyone intent on voting multiple times isn't going to be hampered besides that, most of the time the election worker isn't going to know how to tell a real from a fake. Actually under the motor voter law anyone who asks MUST be allowed to vote provisionally. It's sad to say but voter fraud isn't going away and there is little the honest voters can do to stop those who would disenfranchise the honest voters by skewing the outcome of an election.