I wrote in my last post that “Increasingly, race is the Democrats’ hammer, as in the old saw that says when all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.” Here’s another example; this time the nails are ballot security programs that attempt to deter voting fraud.
Writing in The American Prospect, Laughlin McDonald, Director of the Voting Rights Project of the ACLU, argues that these programs are “invariably presented as good government measures necessary to prevent voter fraud,” but in fact “far too often they are actually designed to suppress minority voting — and for nakedly partisan purposes.” In other words, one more example of Republican racism.
What is this racist activity? One typical example McDonald provides — or rather, provides an accusation from Democratic poll watchers in Arkansas — has Republican poll watchers “driving away voters in predominantly black precincts by taking photos of them and demanding identification during pre-election day balloting.” Horrors.
What really agitates McDonald, however, is a provision in the “Help America Vote Act” past last October. The offensive section, he writes,
requires anyone who has registered by mail and has not previously voted to present on election day a photo identification — or a utility bill, bank statement, government check or other government document that shows the name and address of the voter. Those who fail to provide the requisite identification must vote by special “provisional” ballot.
The ID requirement is problematic for several reasons. First, minorities are less likely than nonminorities to have photo IDs.
In other words, it is racist — presumably on some version of a disparate impact theory — to require new voters who have registered by mail to present some valid form of identification the first time they show up to vote, or vote on a provisional ballot until their identity can be confirmed.
And second? “[T]here is no evidence, other than anecdotal, that the new ID requirement is needed to reduce voter fraud.”
McDonald, and those inclined to agree with him, should take a look at “Card Carrying Immigrants,” an editorial in the Washington Post last week pointing out that nearly 750,000 matriculas consulares, Mexican consular ID cards, are currently in circulation and, accepted by at least 13 states and 801 police agencies, “are becoming a standard form of identification in the United States.”
Critics rightly note that the 48 Mexican consulates scattered across the United States issue these cards to make life easier for those Mexican citizens who are living here illegally. Legal residents can get the cards, of course, but have no real need for them.
And so, as inevitable as the hammer searching for an available nail, third:
the ID requirement provides another opportunity for aggressive poll officials to single out minority voters and interrogate them, asking humiliating questions such as, “Where’s your government check?” and, “Don’t you have a bank statement?”
Americans might like to think that discrimination against minority voters ended with the civil-rights movement, but it’s been going on in many parts of the country ever since. And ballot-security programs have been the usual vehicle.
For McDonald, as presumably for the editors of The American Prospect, requiring some verifiable form of voter identification is “the new poll tax.”
Darn, I wish my team wouldn’t waste its energy on ideas as stupid as opposing photo ID to vote. First let’s see some evidence that it’s a problem? (We won’t, because all of the poor people I know other than illegal immigrants have a driver’s license.) This is some sort of fetish behavior.
Anyway, there are genuine examples, for instance the totally-bogus Florida felon purge aimed at reducing the Democratic vote. Isn’t this where we should put our time, energy, and outrage?
In Oklahoma, regardless of how you registered, you are mailed (to the address you gave the registrar) a Voter Identification Card, which you may be asked to present at the polling station. In practice, especially if there’s a long line, you just sign the register in the space by your name — registration closes a set period before the election, and the registers are printed after the closing — and pick up a ballot and a marker.
In nine years in this precinct, roughly 50 percent black, I have never seen anyone turned away, and almost everyone seems to have the appropriate card. Admittedly, I don’t hang around the polls all day either, but there’s no indication that we have a major voter-fraud problem in the Sooner State.