Voter ID law struck down in Missouri

So much for the new poll tax. Looks like it's back to the drawing board for the Missouri GOP and its effort to supress the vote: The state supreme court just tossed the recently-passed voter ID law. From Kelly Weise of the P-D:

The Missouri Supreme Court on Monday struck down a new law requiring voters to show a photo ID at the polls, upholding a lower judge's decision.

A lower judge ruled last month that the ID requirement was an unconstitutional infringement on the fundamental right to vote. The Supreme Court agreed in a 6-1 unsigned opinion. [...]

The court found the requirement violated several provisions in the state constitution. The court said requiring otherwise legitimate voters to obtain an appropriate ID imposed too big a burden on their voting rights.

Steve Gilliard had just written today on the insidious application of voter ID legislation by Republicans across the country, a clearer and more present danger to voting rights than anything Diebold might come up with:

While millions of words have been pissed away on Diebold, the GOP has conducted an ongoing stealth campaign to deny millions of poor and elderly the right to vote, Florida 2000 writ large. And the silence on the blogs has been deafening. Diebold is easy to be scared of, but Voter ID laws are the real deal in voter suppression and targeted at the most dedicated voters, the elderly and minorities. [...]

The fact is that you won't need Diebold if you scare people away from voting.

Now the Missouri GOP has been stripped of that tool for scaring voters.

(Meant to cross-post this yesterday, but life got in the way. Sorry!)