e-Team Report, July 30, 2012

Voting Rights Watch

Unfortunately, the effort to limit Americans’ voting rights and restrict access to the ballot box continues unabated. Among a wave of new restrictions, many state laws passed in the last two years require voters to present photo identification in order to vote.

The supposed rationale behind these new voting obstacles is voter fraud, which time and time again has been shown to be incredibly rare. In Pennsylvania, where the state is being sued over its new Republican-backed voter ID law which could potentially disqualify hundreds of thousands of qualified voters, the state has said that it "could not show evidence of such fraud in the past and that it is unlikely to occur in the absence of the law.”

If the new voter ID law isn’t protecting against voter fraud, what could be the real purpose of the law? If you ask Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Mike Turzai, he is quite blunt. “Voter ID,” said Turzai, speaking to Republican activists, “is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.”

To read more about the legal battle over this blatantly partisan effort to undermine voting rights, please click here.

Orzag Says Privatize

In a recent Bloomberg editorial, former OMB director Peter Orzag calls for the outright privatization of the Postal Service. In his editorial, Orzag highlights some problems facing the Postal Service, including decreasing first-class mail volume, the ongoing economic slump, and limitations on how USPS can raise revenue. And yet, somehow he completely omits the single greatest source of postal debt, the prefund mandate.

Instead of calling on Congress to get its act together, pass a responsible fix of the prefunding burden, and set the Postal Service back on the right course, Orzag is content to throw his hands up at the congressional inaction and suggest we just sell the Postal Service to the highest bidder.

To read Orzag’s strained explanations about why we need to privatize the Postal Service, please click here.

Lame Duck Session

As the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives continues to kick the can on real postal reform, talk continues about when postal reform will make it to the floor. To read about the many pieces of legislation awaiting action in Congress that might be addressed in a lame duck session after the November elections, please click here.