Even Our Probably-Worst President Is Right Occasionally: Voter ID Should Be Required
Jimmy Carter and the commmission he co-chaired recommended that identification be required at the polls. He’s right for once, as John Fund explains in his OpinionJournal.com column Monday (bolds are mine):
The Carter-Baker commission issued 87 recommendations to improve the functioning of election systems. One called for a national requirement that electronic voting machines include a paper trail that would allow people to check their votes, while another would have states establish uniform procedures for counting provisional ballots.
But the biggest surprise was that 18 of 21 commissioners backed a requirement that voters show some form of photo identification. They argued that with Congress passing the Real ID Act to standardize security protections for drivers’ licenses in all 50 states, the time had come to standardize voter ID requirements. Former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle joined two other commissioners in complaining that the ID requirements would be akin to a Jim Crow-era “poll tax” and would restrict voting among the poor or elderly who might lack such an ID.
Mr. Daschle’s racially charged analogy is preposterous. Almost everyone needs photo ID in today’s modern world. Andrew Young, the former Atlanta mayor and U.N. ambassador, believes that in an era when people have to show ID to rent a video or cash a check, “requiring ID can help poor people” who otherwise might be even more marginalized by not having one.
The Carter-Baker commissioners recognized that cost could be a barrier to some and thus recommended that identification cards be provided at no cost to anyone who needed one. They also argued that photo ID would make it significantly less likely that a voter would be wrongly turned away at the polls due to out-of-date registration lists or for more malicious reasons. In any case, the tacit acknowledgment by Mr. Carter and most of the other liberals on the commission that the integrity of the ballot is every bit as important as access to the ballot was a welcome one.
The photo ID issue is being joined with the immigration debate because there is growing anecdotal evidence that voter registration by noncitizens is a problem. All that it takes to register is for someone to fill out a postcard, and I have interviewed people who were still allowed to register without checking the box that indicated they were a citizen. Several California counties report that an increasing number of registered voters called up for jury duty write back saying they are ineligible because they aren’t citizens.
The man who in 1994 assassinated Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio in Tijuana had registered to vote at least twice in the U.S. although he was not a citizen. An investigation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service into alleged fraud in a 1996 Orange County, Calif., congressional race revealed that “4,023 illegal voters possibly cast ballots in the disputed election between Republican Robert Dornan and Democrat Loretta Sanchez.”
Sanchez’s razor-thin victory in the 1996 election should have been overturned. The fact that it wasn’t is all the proof anyone should need that only preventing fraudulent voting in the first place will make or keep the election process clean.
The voter-ID requirement is long overdue.
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UPDATE: E-mailer and former US Senate candidate Bill Pierce tipped me to this Hotline blog piece reporting that Ohio Senator Mike DeWine voted against Mitch McConnell’s national voting photo ID amendment. The post further notes that “In A Recent (NBC/Wall Street Journal) Poll, 81% Favored Requiring Voters To Show Valid Photo IDs When They Vote.”
Don’t blame me, I voted for the guy who sent me the e-mail.
