Voter ID

Seen in the New York Times:

The battle over voting rights will expand this week as lawmakers in Missouri are expected to support a proposed constitutional amendment to enable election officials to require proof of citizenship from anyone registering to vote.[...]

The Missouri secretary of state, Robin Carnahan, a Democrat who opposes the measure, estimated that it could disenfranchise up to 240,000 registered voters who would be unable to prove their citizenship.

Now, I’ve been uncomfortable with the notion of requiring Voter ID.  I can understand the concerns by proponents of the concept, but the fact of the matter is that even in this day and age, some people lack photo ID.  Despite the difficulty in participating in society without identification, it’s not a requirement.

I realize that the Supreme Court supported Voter ID laws in part due to plaintiffs’ failure to produce anyone who really was impacted by the law.   However, I can’t help but think that the folks most likely to be impacted are also the folks least likely to complain about being impacted.

The expansion of such a measure only seems to aggravate the problem to me.   A little over a year ago, my wife and I had the experience of trying to secure new “proof of citizenship” for her, in advance of a cruise, since she had forgotten where her passport and birth certificate were.  The hoops we had to go through to get her a new copy of her birth certificate weren’t insurmountable…but that was only because we had net access at home, the means to easily copy some of the supporting documentation required, and spare cash to pay for the processing fees.

I can easily imagine how nearly-impossible the process might seem to a disadvantaged individual.

I’m reminded of something in the Constitution, the 24th Amendment:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.

I know “ID” and “proof of citizenship” don’t translate to “poll tax or any other tax”… but for folks who don’t have the requisite documentation, it would seem that they will be required to shell out a few bucks to obtain that documentation…and that sounds like “other tax” to me.

This only fuels my suspicion that it’s time to move on from the increasingly-illusory belief that an ID is not mandatory in American society.   If you’re going to require identification to exercise one of the fundamental rights of citizenship, you might as well mandate that everyone possess identification documents, and help those without such papers to obtain them.

If we are going to slide down that slope, however, could we at least get some privacy protections to cushion our assimilation?

The idea that not everybody has a photo ID was glossed over in a few states’ rush to mandate such identification as a prerequisite to voting. However, the New York Times has run a story attaching a face to an undocumented voter:

But on Election Day last November, Valerie Williams became that evidence, according to lawyers in a case that will be argued before the Supreme Court on Wednesday. After Ms. Williams grabbed her cane that day and walked into the polling station in the lobby of her retirement home to vote, as she has done in at least the last two elections, she was barred from doing so.

The election officials at the polling place, whom she had known for years, told her she could not cast a regular ballot. They said the forms of identification she had always used — a telephone bill, a Social Security letter with her address on it and an expired Indiana driver’s license — were no longer valid under the voter ID law, which required a current state-issued photo identification card.

“Of course I threw a fit,” said Ms. Williams, 61, who was made to cast a provisional ballot instead, which, according to voting records, was never counted. Ms. Williams — who has difficulty walking — said she was not able to get a ride to the voting office to prove her identity within 10 days as required under the law, and her ballot was discarded.[...]

A brief filed with the Supreme Court by the Marion County Board of Elections, the state’s largest voting jurisdiction and a defendant in the case, said Ms. Williams — who is a black Republican — and 31 other voters had to cast provisional ballots because they showed up at the polls without the state-required ID, which can include a driver’s license, a passport, a state-issued ID or some other government-issued photo identification. Because they also failed to appear later at county offices with the identification required to validate their identities, all of these voters had their ballots thrown out, records show. In interviews, many of these voters said they could not find transportation or could not afford the IDs.

All of these voters appeared at the polling place for the precinct in which they were registered, and all of the signatures on their provisional-ballot envelopes matched the appropriate poll book signatures. At least 14 of these voters had voted in 10 elections before last year, according to voting records.

A few years ago, I would have believed that the Supreme Court would likely view the photo ID requirement as a combination of some form of discrimination against folks with disability, and a poll tax. However, with the Roberts court having developed a bit of a neoconservative air about it, now I’m not so sure.