Voter ID: A GOP plot to defeat Obama?

last updated 8 January 2015

Republicans are trying to steal the 2012 presidential election, said E.J. Dionne in The Washington Post. In Texas, Kansas, Wisconsin, and more than a dozen GOP-controlled states around the nation, Republican legislators are passing laws requiring voters to present a driver’s license or other government-issued photo ID at the polls before casting their ballots. The stated goal of these so-called “voter ID” laws is to prevent an epidemic of voter fraud, even though “study after study has shown that fraud by voters is not a major problem.” Like the “poll taxes’’ of the Jim Crow era, these new laws have one real purpose: to discourage voting by African-Americans, Hispanics, the poor, and the young—the groups that were the key to Barack Obama’s victory in 2008. “If this were happening in an emerging democracy, we’d condemn it as election-rigging. But it’s happening here so there’s barely a whimper.”

What paranoid nonsense, said Hans von Spakovsky in USA Today. There is no evidence that requiring proper ID discourages any legitimate voter from casting a ballot. Indeed, after Georgia and Indiana instituted voter ID laws, amid apocalyptic cries of protest from the Left, there was no decrease in voting by minorities and the poor. Voter fraud, on the other hand, is real, with numerous documented cases of people voting under assumed names or of noncitizens casting ballots. Indeed, if anything is racist, said Dennis Prager in National Review Online, it’s the suggestion that black people somehow “lack the capacity to obtain a photo ID.” How liberals manage to peddle this condescending nonsense while still claiming to stand for minority rights is a mystery.

Most minorities do have a photo ID, said Justin Levitt in Politico.com, but about 11 percent do not. That could add up to millions of votes not cast for Obama, and as Republicans know all too well, it could easily be the difference in a close election. Besides, casting individual fraudulent ballots “is an immensely inefficient way to steal an election.’’ You steal elections by losing a machine or a box containing thousands of votes, or by manipulating absentee ballots. I grew up with the people targeted by voter ID laws, said Cynthia Tucker in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. They’re poor folk who don’t own cars or have driver’s licenses, and who pay bills in cash. Making it harder for them to vote may or may not be racist, but it’s certainly “un-American.”