GOP Bouncers at the Voting Club

In politics, you really can't go wrong picking on felons.

They haven't got much of a lobby. If a poll were conducted, they'd get a lousy approval rating, perhaps even lower than Congress. And In Iowa, thousands of them can't vote, even after they've served their time. Gov. Terry Branstad made sure of that.

The Associated Press reports that fewer than a dozen felons got their voting rights back among 8,000 who have been released or finished sentences since Branstad took office in January 2011. The five-term Republican repealed a previous executive order by former Gov. Tom Vilsack granting automatic restoration for felons no longer under state supervision.

Maybe you thought Vilsack's order was too lefty loosey. I can see that. But Branstad's application process is ridiculously tight. In particular, its requirement for a full credit report seems excessive and questionable. Months of waiting for an answer often ends with a rejection because of issues with all the required paperwork.

Of course, we could easily devise a system where corrections staff and courts compile periodic lists of felons who have been released and have paid fines and other costs, or who are making steady progress paying those debts. If we're really interested in blind justice, not cheap political theatrics, those people would get their voting rights back automatically.

It's sort of like the endless debate over requiring photo IDs for voting. Instead of thinking about ways to safeguard the voting process that don't hassle voters or risk causing bigger problems for people than they solve, we get demands for requirements and barriers.

And maybe that's because this isn't really about sanctity and integrity.

Take Branstad's felons policy. Add the ID requirement. Throw in U.S. Rep. Steve King's successful suit to bar the state from offering voter registration info to residents in languages other than English. Then look at the Iowa Republican platform, approved this month.

It would seek to get rid of Election Day voter registration, and until that happens, votes cast by same-day registrants would be set aside as “provisional ballots.” The platform calls for requiring that college students vote only in the precinct where they are claimed as a tax dependents, not where they live. But, if you're an absentee property owner, Republicans believe you should be permitted to vote in bond issue elections in the jurisdiction where you own land, even if you don't live there. The platform also calls for limits on absentee and satellite voting, and for going back to that sepia-toned days when state legislatures picked the U.S. Senate.

Add it all up and it looks less like safeguarding and more like gate-keeping. Republicans have hired themselves as bouncers at the “Voting Club,” with plenty of velvet rope to keep out the riff raff.

But the party of Lincoln should remember that when he invoked “a government of the people, by the people and for the people,” he did not hasten to add,  "but certain terms and conditions may apply...”