Recently, there has been an epidemic infringement of U.S. voter rights occurring in states across the country. Currently, 14 states have passed laws that require voters to have photo identification. And perhaps 20 more have similar laws under consideration. The Supreme Court has said that the right to vote is a fundamental right, and it is perhaps the most fundamental of all our rights. It is truly the foundation of democracy.
Thus, the current standard to identify voters could include a self-identification by signature or a household identification, such as a bill which are compared against voting records at the polling place. It has been this way for generations.
But now The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, claims that voter ID laws are "necessary to protect the integrity of elections." This is a fantastic sentiment — I cannot argue against maintaining the integrity of elections. In fact, that is the very reason why the law should not exist.
The Heritage Foundation also claims "every illegal vote steals or dilutes the vote of a legitimate voter." This is a true statement. And yes, this could potentially be a problem. However, in order to truly examine the issue you cannot look just only at principle, but also at magnitude.
There are an infinite number of things wrong with the U.S., but only the most important are worthy of being addressed by legislation. Small government conservatives should agree with this idea. Why is it then that they are supportive of a law of such little consequence?
In Kansas, secretary of state, Kris Kobach, and a Republican legislature supported a voter ID law based on documented evidence of 221 reported instances from 1997-2010. Clearly this microscopic number is not remotely close enough to make a significant difference, even in very close elections.
If that statistic were not inconsequential enough, some dedicated journalists investigated and found that most of these ‘reported instances of voter fraud' were far from "fraud." Most were not even intentional at all, but rather honest mistakes. These include when mail-in ballots did not match exactly with the signature on file and when parents tried to vote for their children who were away at college. If you take into account the inaccuracies in the already meager data, the law looks even more preposterous.
What is clear are the intentions of the Republican politicians in the states that have passed or are considering these laws. To put it bluntly, people without photo IDs will more likely vote Democratic. This demographic primarily consists of young people, the elderly and minorities.
It is hard to argue that the new policies are not directed at this demographic. This becomes even clearer when you examine one possible, and notable, exception. Students, typically bastions of Democratic principles, are allowed to use their student IDs when voting if the IDs meet the new law's requirements; however, there are currently no student IDs that meet the requirements.
In other words, the politicians who created the law thought of a possible loophole that would have let many students (or Democrats) vote and then they excluded it by imposing new regulations like the rather absurd requirement of an expiration date.
Perhaps there will be student IDs in the future that meet the requirement, but there has already been resistance. In Wisconsin, the Government Accountability Board that set the requirements had planned on including a sticker on college IDs that would have made then legal to use as identification at the polls.
However, Republicans politicians argued that the sticker would lead to — you guessed it — voter fraud. Their counter-proposal was for the colleges to issue a second ID card, for the sole purpose of voting, to college students who needed them. And who would pay for these cards? The University.
The only problem is that the Universities claim they don't have money to pay for them. And for public schools, such as the University of Wisconsin, the state will not be providing money.
One likely result of this lack of funding is that no secondary IDs will get made, a foresight that the Republican politicians surely maintained.
Another possibility is that students will have to pay for their IDs to vote. Paying for an ID that you need to vote is nothing more than a poll tax and would be far more of a challenge to the integrity of elections than this miniscule voter fraud. Sure, many college students who do not have a photo ID will go out and get a government issued ID if they want to vote. But the fact of the matter is that this is an unnecessary obstacle not required of other voters and not all will; some voters will still be disenfranchised.
So these voter ID laws, which have passed in 14 states already, fixed a problem that did not exist and were directed at disenfranchising people who the current establishment thinks will not vote for them. But how far reaching is the significance of this disenfranchisement? It is quite large.
The Brennan Center for Justice has analyzed the data and states "these new laws could make it significantly harder for more than five million eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012." The figure of 21,000,000 people - 11 percent of the population- has been reported as being without government photo ID's. This underscores how out of proportion the reaction is and the huge potential for mischief and massive disenfranchisement — even if only a very small percentage of these people are prevented to vote. Furthermore, the states that have already cut back on voting rights "will provide 63 percent of the electoral votes needed to win the Presidency."
Voting laws designed to restrict the ability of a segment of the population to exercise democracy's most fundamental right are not compatible with the beacon of democracy that America advertises. Rather, they hark back to the Jim Crow laws that disenfranchised blacks in the 19th and 20th centuries. They should be seen as a shameful step away from progress and should be done away with altogether.
