A Stitch in Haste

The New York Times is concerned about Georgia's new "voter ID law" requiring a government-issued ID (not necessarily a drivers license) at the polling place. The law, the Times avers without proof, is actually intended to disenfranchise poor and black voters rather than to reduce voter fraud --

The new law's supporters claim that it is an attempt to reduce voter fraud, but Secretary of State Cathy Cox has said she cannot recall a single case during her tenure when anyone impersonated a voter.
...
Georgia's new identification requirement is part of a nationwide drive to erect barriers at the polls. Indiana also recently passed a new photo-identification requirement, and several other states, including Ohio, are considering the addition of such requirements.

There are many steps states can take to reduce election fraud. But laws that condition voting on having a particular piece of identification that many eligible voters do not possess have no place in a democracy.

This is, of course, utter nonsense.

I certainly accept the premise that a facially neutral law can burden the poor more than the rich. Banning people from sleeping under bridges comes to mind.

But an equally fundamental principle also applies when discussing voting: With rights come responsibilities.

There is a fundamental difference, which the Times fails to acknowledge, between rules that keep eligible voters away from the polls and those that keep ineligible voters away. To analogize a voter ID law to the truly disenfranchising maneuvers of the past — such as property ownership requirements, literacy tests or poll taxes — is an insult to the past victims of those now-abolished restrictions.

The Times strings together a long daisy chain of straw man arguments in opposing voter ID:

--Poor, elderly, and black voters may not have drivers licenses. So what? These laws require government IDs, not drivers licenses. It's hard to imagine that wide swaths of any electorate not only don't have drivers licenses but also no acceptable alternative. This is the 21st Century and the post-9/11 world, after all. And of course just because these people don't have proper ID doesn't mean they can't get proper ID.

--Voter ID does nothing to prevent absentee ballot fraud. So what? It's not designed to prevent absentee ballot fraud, but rather ineligible voter fraud.

--Voter impersonation does not appear to be a rampant problem. So what? Again, the problem isn't Person A pretending to be Person B, but rather Person A pretending to be qualified to vote in the first place. Voter ID does help prevent that kind of fraud, through eliminating multiple voting and curbing voting by non-citizens.

If the New York Times is so concerned about "hitting the target" when it comes to voter fraud, then it need look no further than its own backyard and condemn the single biggest voter fraud of our time, the "Snowbird vote" in which retirees illegally cast votes in both New York (especially New York City) and Florida. See my previous post. The Times' silence on the Snowbird vote is not only deafening, but inexcusably hypocritical in light of its indignation over this Georgia law that might inconvenience (not disenfranchise, but inconvenience) a handful of voters at most.

And imposing the eminently reasonable responsibility of proving your identity at the voting booth is not so outrageous or so clearly correlated with income or race as to run afoul of the Voting Rights Act. In our national agglomeration of often dysfunctional election systems, voter ID is a modest first step toward rationalizing this important cornerstone of our democracy.

Tomorrow: Atlanta's anti-panhandling law.