EDITORIAL: Call for caution on voter ID

Memphis Commercial Appeal ^ | 5/2/8 | Editor

[SmithL]

The Supreme Court's approval of the country's strictest election standards doesn't mean every state should adopt them -

The U.S. Supreme Court stamped its approval this week on Indiana's decision to require voters to show photo identification at the polls. Should Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas get in line?

Not necessarily. State lawmakers should always be concerned about the integrity of the ballot, decide what can reasonably and fairly be expected of voters and legislate accordingly.

But there is no federal mandate to adopt the photo ID, a solution that still seems to be in search of a problem.

In his dissenting opinion, Justice David H. Souter explained what was wrong with this legislation, and this ruling: There was no evidence of in-person voter impersonation in Indiana, he noted, and "very little" nationwide. "The interest in combating voter fraud," Souter noted, "has too often served as a cover for unnecessarily restrictive electoral rules."

A Tennessee photo ID law would not have prevented the only serious case of election fraud in the Mid-South in recent history.

The phony votes cast in a 2005 special election in state Senate District 29 in Memphis were the products of an inside job by election officials who manipulated the system.

Three poll workers apparently trying to throw the election to Ophelia Ford pleaded guilty to fraud in that case after faking at least three votes, two of which had been cast in the names of dead people. They wouldn't have had to produce any sort of ID to pull that one off.

Abuse of the system by voters, however, is practically nonexistent. The real issue with voter ID laws revolves around the perception that they discourage voting among older, poorer, mostly minority and mostly Democratic voters.

The Indiana photo ID law, one of the nation's toughest ballot protection statutes, was approved by Republicans on a strict, party-line vote. Concerns expressed recently about the protection of the ballot in Mississippi have come from the GOP side, as well.

Will such laws have a substantial effect on election outcomes? That seems unlikely, in an age when most voters can readily produce a photo ID.

In fact, it doesn't seem burdensome to require some form of identification at the polls. But the rules should be reasonable. Anything that discourages voter turnout or results in even a few legitimate voters not being able to exercise their rights on election day is harmful to the democracy.

In the South, fights over voter identification laws are too reminiscent of the bad old days of voter intimidation -- in the form of poll taxes, citizenship tests and the like -- that were clearly intended to discourage African-Americans from exercising their rights.

Overly strict voter identification laws are so divisive they are not really worth the fight, sapping energy from the real problems faced by lawmakers.

In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, "Now we have a very clear roadmap for other states to follow," said Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita, a Republican. "We've been getting calls from 25 other states that have been waiting for a green light, waiting to proceed."

Surely with more serious problems to address, they would be better off to proceed with caution.

[adorno]

State lawmakers should always be concerned about the integrity of the ballot, decide what can reasonably and fairly be expected of voters and legislate accordingly.

If integrity of the ballot and fairness for all voters are of the utmost concerns, then why would an editor even bother to raise any issues at all with a voter ID law? Very likely, that editor liked the status-quo were voter fraud could be used to undo the votes of those that didn't or wouldn't vote the way the editor or democrats wanted.

If integrity of elections is the issue, any kind of voter fraud at all puts that integrity into question immediately. Voter ID is just one of the perhaps many steps that need to be undertaken to assure the integrity of the vote. If an election can be turned in the opposite direction of what the real voters wished, then democracy is the loser. The outcome of an election that was won with fraud is not representative of the true wishes of the majority. If the majority's wishes can be overturned so easily by fraud, then it is in fact democracy that has been overturned.

That the editor can't see the benefits, then it is he that doesn't support democracy and the integrity of the vote.

[weegee]

One thing that is good about the electoral college system, it keeps us from having to do a national recount, county by crooked county.

If there are some irregularities and suspicious ballots, the poll in question can be investigated. If the vote isn’t close then there is no change to the outcome of the national results even in the event of obvious fraud.