On Monday, the Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s voter identification law, concluding
that the challengers failed to prove that the law’s photo ID
requirement placed an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote.
Voter IDs have been pushed by Republicans in several states, in addition to Indiana.
Next year, they’ll bring back poll taxes and literacy requirements. Good news!
Apt. 11d 
How can anybody fully function in a modern society without photo ID? If there really are millions of American citizens without photo ID, let’s get them IDs.
I just registered to vote in Texas. The next order of business is to cancel my registrations in WA and PA. Theoretically, I could have voted in all three locations, or four if I had registered in DC. I don’t know exactly how the system works in either area, but presumably my failure to cancel my registration left the door open to fraud, especially since one of the registrations was for an absentee ballot.
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I work for the my county’s Commissioner of Elections and and voter fraud at the polls is basically non-existent. If you read the Supreme Court decision, it acknowledges this fact.
This is yet another example of legislation via fear mongering by Republicans. Anyone who works on elections or takes the trouble to look at the numbers knows that voter turnout, even for presidential elections, is abysmal–and we’re just talking percentages of people that actually bothered to register to vote. Anyone who takes the time to show up at the polls or fill out an absentee request is not doing it to commit fraud. And if they do? Guess what, it’s a felony.
Amy P–states are exchanging information all the time to cancel each other’s registrations. There is also the National Change of Address process instituted by HAVA. I’m not saying it’s perfect, but believe me, people are working on this every day, 8-5.
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This is basically a fake controversy, except for some areas with high fraud. For most of the country, Reeps have noticed that their voters will take more trouble to ensure that they are on the rolls, and Dems have noticed that more of their folks will give up if there are slight obstacles. And people try to pretend that there is high moral purpose to their positions, rather than a 2% shift in the vote if it is trouble to cast it, which can matter for state/national elections.
For a few areas (well, yes, Cook County. And East Saint Louis and maybe Newark, at least when Sharpe James ran things) voter fraud is huge, and may matter on who wins local elections. Nassau? And in these areas, it is an important good-government issue for local winners.
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Dave — what do you cite for Cook County as a place with high voter fraud? Yes, we all know about the dead people who voted in the 1960’s, but Chicago *has* changed since then.
I’ve been hugely troubled by the use of voter fraud allegations since watching the agonizing process of recounting the votes in Washington. My own ballot (absentee) was disqualified for a signature mismatch. The letter about the mismatch arrived at my house too late for me to do anything about it (while I was in Europe, actually). So, my vote didn’t get counted. Fortunately, this was in an “unimportant” primary, and not the election that was decided by 269 votes.
At the same time that my ballot was getting disqualified because of a sloppy signature (and a weirdly spelled name, presumably), in a dense urban area, election commissioners in sparsely populated rural counties were saying “yes, her signature didn’t look the same, but I know that Julia had a stroke last year, so it was fine.”
So, I take this kind of personally (along with my decision to carry my passport along when I went to Arizona). When we went, my daughter asked: do you need a passport to go to Arizona. My husband and I looked at her, a bit wryly, and decided it was better to take it along. The weight of the thousandth feather, further marginalizing the folks who are already marginalized, that’s what these laws do.
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Things may have changed and the states may be carefully cross-checking, but at least in 2004, my parents got an absentee ballot for me at their address. By that time, I had also been registered in PA for about four years. The one was under my maiden name and the other was under my married name, so that may have made a difference. Unless I make an effort to pull the plug on my voter registration, I expect another WA ballot will be mailed to my parents for 2008.
I think you guys are trusting your fellow man a little bit too much. How do we know how much fraud there is, if barely any precautions are being taken? We do know that online polls get scammed all the time. The sort of passion that leads people to vote for Ron Paul 1,000 times in a single poll or slash the tires on get-out-the-vote-vans could easily lead someone to vote with his deceased or demented grandma’s absentee ballot.
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“Unless I make an effort to pull the plug on my voter registration, I expect another WA ballot will be mailed to my parents for 2008.”
But, it would have been illegal for you to turn it in. Are you arguing that the passion that drives online voting would drive people to commit a felony.
In WA, there was a concerted effort to look for voter fraud. They found a few instances of people turning in absentee ballots that didn’t belong to them — a reasonable proportion of those were turned in for the recently dead (some of whom had filled out the ballots before they died).
This kind of voter ID law does nothing to stop that kind of fraud, in any case — no one asks for your ID when you turn in a ballot sent to your home.
The supreme court decided that the Indiana law didn’t violate the constitution (and Indiana is not one of the states under special scrutiny because of a past history of voting violations). But, it doesn’t make the law a good one.
I’m not going to argue that there is zero voter fraud. For me, it’s a balance question. How many legitimate voters do we disenfranchse in exchange for every fraudulent one? As Dave states, there’s no evidence suggesting that ratio is anything but very very large.
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“Are you arguing that the passion that drives online voting would drive people to commit a felony.”
Yes, I do. In view of phenomena like media piracy, plagiarism and massive mortgage and other housing fraud, I’m a bit more jaundiced than I used to be about the honesty of my fellow American. I think it’s worthwhile to take basic precautions to safeguard the voting process and to move toward a biometric system. We have lots of smart people in the US, and it really shouldn’t be hard to do this. Si, se puede!
On a lighter note, while I was thinking about this stuff I turned up a 2006 story about fraud in the town of Appalachia, where votes were being sold for beer, cigarettes, and pork rinds. It’s such a perfect story–I so want it to be true.
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“But, it would have been illegal for you to turn it in.”
Even if it weren’t me, there would be lots of other possibilities. My parents might be overcome by partisan passion and send it in, or if I had an old roommate, former spouse, or landlady, they might do it for a good cause.
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I just remembered another popular form of fraud: identity theft. You wouldn’t believe the number of people who call in to my favorite radio show asking what to do after their mom, sibling, or other relative stole their identity and wrecked their credit.
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Lawyers, Guns & Money quotes the Stevens concurrence:
“The only kind of voter fraud that SEA 483 addresses is in-person voter impersonation at polling places. The record contains no evidence of any such fraud actually occurring in Indiana at any time in its history.”
The opinion notes that absentee ballot fraud has happened recently, and as the post continues, “So the only type of fraud shown to have occurred in Indiana history is a type the statute specifically doesn’t address, and as it happens this apparently irrational choice happens to coincide with the partisan interests of the legislators who enacted the statute. This really isn’t good enough if you want to burden the fundamental right to vote.”
But apparently it’s ok if your legislature is Republican.
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Doug,
How do they handle election security over in your neck of the woods?
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The problem, Amy, is that there’s no evidence that voter fraud is a wide-spread problem. It’s hard enough to get people to vote once for their candidates. It’s way too much trouble to vote twice. So, for every one case of true voter fraud that you stop with a voter ID, you could end up turning away or turning off thousands of real voters.
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Doug’s point is particularly important, ’cause the type of voter fraud that’s most likely (the kind that can be done in the privacy of your on home with an absentee ballot) is the least regulated.
BTW, the comparison to media piracy, plagiarism and mortgage and housing fraud are bad comparisons — the difference between casting one or two or three extra votes for a candidate and mortgage fraud is that the felon personally benefits, directly from mortgage fraud. And, we actually know that people do those other things.
As I said, in WA, people searched, and searched, and searched, for voter fraud, and found almost none. Since absentee ballots are common in WA, it seems the most prone to fraud.
I do think, though, that the WA situation points out a “non-partisan” reason why Republicans obsess about this issue. In WA, nearly a majority of the votes come from King county (where Seattle is). Not surprisingly, as a result, King county counts its votes last, and votes substantially more Democratic than the rest of the state. Votes are counted slowly, since many of our votes are absentee, and can be counted until weeks after the election. So, if you support the Republican,for days, and even weeks, you can think you’re winning, while seeing your lead being whittled away from the *new* ballots appearing in King county. Last time around, they even found bags of votes they’d forgotten, in a corner or a closet when they did the third recount.
The Reps in our state were outraged, imagining that King was manufacturing ballots. But, my take home lesson was that ballots are routinely under-counted in large urban areas, where some ballots are lost, damaged, and ignored.
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I’ve heard that in Indiana, the IDs are free. I’ve also heard about provisional ballots in some places. If you forget your ID, you cast a provisional ballot, and then you bring in your ID at your leisure to make your ballot official.
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Here’s an idea:
Since we all agree that absentee ballots are vulnerable to fraud, maybe they should be done away with, except with presentation of a doctor’s note, proof of military active duty, etc.
I’d also like to see a more compact national ID, as well as some quick, easy method of checking immigration status of prospective employees.
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No, we don’t agree that absentee ballots are vulnerable to fraud. We agree that the Indiana law does nothing to prevent absentee ballot fraud, if it were to occur.
As I’ve stated (at least twice), a determined hunt for absentee ballot fraud in WA found virtually nothing at all. So, I believe the evidence is heavily stacked against absentee ballot fraud (as well as any other kind of fraud).
As Laura stated in starting this post, this is a classic law whose purpose is other than what it says it is. Apparently, that’s not unconstitutional. So, the solution to fixing it has to be political — we need to kick the people who make the bad laws out of office, so that they won’t pass laws that hinder legal behavior (voting), while preventing a problem that doesn’t exist (in person voter fraud).
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First, people keep saying that there is no need to check IDs because there is no evidence of fraud by voter impersonation. That argument seems a bit beside the point, since checking IDs is pretty much the only way to get evidence of that type of fraud.
Second, I don’t see what the big deal is. Parties try to shift the rules to advantage themselves all of the time. I’m sitting in a city where the Democrats cannot lose because they’ve had control of the rules since the 1930s. Sure, I complain about it, but I don’t actually go to court about anything but my property taxes.
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For why we think it’s a big deal — 1) the history, the ugly history, of voter suppression in the South. The history produced a consent decree in the southern states to review all of their changes in voting rules in the context of their effects. Indiana does not operate under that consent decree, but, that’s why “we” (not me, really) go to court about it 2) The belief that the votes of the “marginalized” are systematically under-counted, including the urban poor, non-english speakers, homeless people, people who move frequently, new citizens — my experience with recounts in WA — increasingly common, proves this to be the case. Counting all the votes seems to increase the vote in urban areas by 1-2%, showing that we routinely don’t count all the votes, and that under-counting biases elections.
(oh, and, of course, I do prefer to gain those votes for my side, but I do really believe in counting the votes in rural areas with floods, too, even if they don’t agree with me).
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Why bother with poll taxes and literacy requirements? Let’s just go straight to the endgame and deputize the Ku Klux Klan.
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BJ, I get the whole helping the marginalized thing, but maybe helping the marginalized to get some ID might be a bigger help to toward de-marginalization of the marginalized than making it easier for them to vote. I’m un-marginal and I can’t help but notice that I have to use a verifiable ID very frequently. If I didn’t have such an ID I would be very poor, very quickly.
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bj,
The homeless seem to come in handy when running election fraud on a large scale. In Oregon in the eighties, the Rajneeshis of Rajneeshpuram paid the way for thousands of homeless people to move to their community, in part to win the local election. Going the extra mile, the Rajneeshis poisoned many salad bars in the Dalles and infected hundreds of Oregonians with salmonella, in the hope of keeping them from voting.
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