The Missouri House on Wednesday gave first-round approval to a resolution that would ask voters to amend the state constitution to require voters show photo identification before casting a ballot. If passed by voters, a bill, which also gained initial approval Wednesday, would dictate how the constitutional amendment would be enforced. The House debated the proposals for a tense two hours, during which Republicans argued that the bill was to protect elections against voter impersonation fraud. Democrats spoke against the proposal, saying that many constituents don’t possess IDs or a birth certificate needed to acquire an ID. They said that students and elderly African Americans born in the South would be especially impacted by the bill’s passage.
Some Democrats said the proposals hearken back to the South’s racist Jim Crow laws, which were used historically to suppress the black vote.
“A lot of people were hurt, and a lot of people died to get in to vote,” said Rep. Joe Adams, D-University City. “And here we are debating, ‘well, we’ll just create these voter ID laws.’”
Full Article: Voter ID bill wins initial approval in Missouri House : News.