Feature Not A Bug

The conservative war to obstruct voting rights grinds on [1]: "A 97-year-old Surprise woman who has voted in the past 19 presidential elections said she finds herself a casualty in the voter ID battle. Shirley Preiss cannot register in Arizona for the November elections without proof of citizenship.... Preiss was born in 1910 in Clinton, Ky., before birth certificates were issued. She said she no longer has a driver’s license and never had a passport."

Make that the 45-year conservative war—ever since their national effort to use the mails to keep as few Democrats from voting as possible began in 1964. [2] I've been writing about it for some time now. [3] How did I learn about it? From conservatives who bragged about it to me in interviews. Flipping through a recent memoir by Barry Goldwater's 1964 finance chair [4], I find one still bragging—for the record:

Eagle Eye volunteers mailed out some 15 million pieces of first-class mail to the entire voter registration lists in certain precincts where voting fraud had earlier been suspected or proven. The envelopes included a local return address and postal instructions to "Return to Sender."... by October 29, almost 3,000 names had been excised from the rolls in Chicago alone...