Want to vote? Passport, please. [View All]

[kurth]

September 20, 2006
Want to vote? Passport, please.
Posted by Frank James at 4:55 pm CDT

The House passed today by a largely partisan vote of 228 to 196 the Federal Election Integrity Act of 2006 which would require anyone wanting to vote in a federal election to present polling place officials with a government-issued photo ID. But according to the legislation, it can’t be any old government-issued photo ID. It must be one that proves its holder is a U.S. citizen.

That rules out driver’s licenses since a legal, non-citizen U.S. resident can get those. And in many states illegal immigrants can still get drivers licenses though that is set to change in a couple of years when the federal REAL ID Act is scheduled to take effect. So under the legislation whose sponsor is Illinois' own Republican Rep. Henry Hyde, a lot of people may wind up needing to take their U.S. passports with them to vote on future election days if the FEIA is passed by the Senate and signed into law by President Bush.

... Republicans repeatedly talked of non-citizens voting in U.S. elections. Opponents, however, said there’s little proof of an epidemic of voter fraud. The legislation is a solution in search of a problem, they say. They warn that large numbers of voters will be disenfranchised because older and poor voters, among others, won’t easily be able to obtain an unimpeachable government-issued ID. It costs $85 /actually it's $97/ to get a passport, not counting the cost of photographs. And a passport isn’t something that a lot of Americans have. Indeed, the State Department says only 27 percent of Americans possess one.

State issued IDs would be allowed. But states with voter ID laws like Georgia and Missouri are requiring voters to show proof of citizenship like birth certificates before issuing the documents and, hard as it is for many to believe, some Americans don’t have birth certificates. A Kansas City woman the opponents use as Exhibit A, Maria Frencher, can’t get a birth certificate because she was adopted and doesn’t know her actual father’s details. Opponents consider the photo ID requirement as a new poll tax, the descendant of the insidious poll taxes that were common in the South and meant to disenfranchise black voters after the Constitution's 15th Amendment gave them the right to vote following the Civil War...

http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/news_theswamp/2006/09/want_to_vote_pa.html