I know you'll be shocked to learn that, yes, voter-suppression laws actually, you know, suppress votes. Especially in the newly insane state of North Carolina.

About 218,000 North Carolinians, roughly five percent of registered voters, do not have an acceptable form of government-issued ID that is now required under state law to cast a ballot. Early voting offered a glimpse of the problems that will arise on Tuesday—during the past ten days of early voting, many college students were blocked from the polls. North Carolina's WRAL reported that 864 people across the state had cast provisional early ballots because they did not have acceptable forms of ID, and four of the five counties with the highest concentrations of provisional ballots from voters without ID were in places with college campuses.

It's a good thing that John Roberts declared the Day of Jubilee because, otherwise, people might wildly speculate that there are certain kinds of people who other people would rather not have voting in their elections.

In recent weeks, I've written about 94-year-old Rosanell Eaton, who had to recite the Preamble to the Constitution from memory to register to vote in Jim Crow North Carolina during the 1940s and had to make 11 trips to different state agencies in 2015 to comply with the new law. And 86-year-old Reba Bowser, a Republican voter since the Eisenhower era, whose voter ID application was initially rejected despite the fact that she presented an expired New Hampshire driver's license, two different birth certificates, a Social Security card, a Medicare card, and her apartment lease to the DMV.

A democracy that does this to its citizens is no democracy at all.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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