Sadly, the last time I wrote about Sen. Kirk Watson it was in response to his abysmal performance on MSNBC back during the Obama v. Clinton portion of the election--he's a good man, a good legislator whom I've never thought of as being over-the-top political. Chronic: Habitually Updated Buzz has posted the full text of Watson's speech before the Texas Senate on the Voter ID Law that was about to be passed by the Senate. It gets to the crux of the matter better than anything else I've seen so I'll reproduce some of it here and encourage you to go read it in its entirety if you want to know what our Senate hath wrought, Watson's 3/17 Speech Against Voter ID:
There remains only the flimsiest evidence that voter impersonation – the only type of fraud addressed by this bill – even exists. Not counting 60-year-old history and the unverified testimony of a controversial witness for a partisan elections administrator, nothing at all we’ve heard demonstrates that this is actually occurring any more than anecdotally in Texas.
And let’s be honest – if someone had the goods on a case that was going to settle this fight once and for all, they probably would have been testifying at some time other than 4 in the morning.
It’s also far from clear that Senate Bill 362 will stop whatever irregularities might conceivably be out there. We’ve heard of concerns about absentee ballots – this bill does nothing about them. We’ve heard about suspicious voter registrations – this bill leaves registration procedures entirely in place. We’ve been showered with hypotheticals about how much could possibly go wrong if some shadowy figure decided they’d rather steal a voter registration card than an election.
Yet we’ve heard of no instances in memory where our elections failed our democracy because people impersonated voters.
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