It is a fact that this campaign by Republicans is about voter suppression and not about preventing non existent voter fraud.
http://votingrights.news21.com/...
Below the squiggly is a personal example of the difficulties a voter will face to get the proper paperwork in order to sastisfy the new Voter ID laws.
My 93 year mother came to visit us in southern MO recently. Since since she had to fly to get here we discovered that her FL driver's licence had expired (she hasn't driven in years). Expired DL are acceptable by the TSA for one year past expiration date so she was allowed to fly, but expired DL are not valid for Voter ID in FL.
Mom is a committed voter and wanted to be sure that she was able to exercise her right to vote. In order for her to get a new FL ID she would need a copy of her birth certificate, and since she was married and had changed her name, a copy of her marriage licence. These papers happen to be in a lock box in northern WI that only my sister (working in WY for the summer) has access to. Even though Mom has two Masters degrees from the Univ of WI she is not computer savvy and even if she was she has physical difficulty typing. Knowing this, it was up to us to locate the proper paperwork on the internet so that she could get a FL ID card. This was not a big deal for my wife as she has had a lot of experience doing document searches and in a matter of minutes she had located the documents and noted the steps it would take to obtain them. We were able to get her the documents but the cost for copying and mailing them to us was $45. The money was not a factor for Mom and because we were there to help her this turned out OK for her and she will be able to obtain a FL ID now that she is back home. But for many seniors without help and/or on fixed incomes these would have been very large problems and enough of a burden that many would just forgo voting.
Voter suppression is exactly what the leadership of the Republican party wants to achieve. Reducing voter turnout in a demographic that may vote against them is their chosen path to power. It was almost mission accomplished for Republicans in the case of my Mother, silencing the vote of a life long liberal, and is very likely to be successful with many other elderly voters with document challenges. Republicans are afraid that if the voter turn out is anywhere near what it was in 2008 President Obama will be re elected, Democrats will retain the Senate and possibly even regain the House. That is why they have fraudulently manufactured a non existent voter fraud crisis to enable them to enact voter suppression laws.