article | posted January 10, 2008 (January 28, 2008 issue)
The Voter ID Fraud
Garrett Epps
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080128/epps There's a war on across the country over who will be allowed to vote in 2008. One of the key battles in the election was fought on January 9 before the Supreme Court.
The case is called Crawford v. Marion County Election Board. It tests an Indiana statute, passed in 2005, requiring voters to present a government-issued ID before they can cast a ballot. The law is aimed at alleged fraudulent voting by unregistered or noncitizen voters. Republicans insist that these voters pose a major problem, despite the fact that every systematic study of the question has concluded that this kind of fraud--called "voter impersonation"--is all but unknown in the United States right now. In fact, authorities in Indiana could not point to a single case of voter impersonation in the state's history.
Voter ID laws span a wide spectrum. The federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA), passed in 2002, provides that all states must require ID from first-time voters who register by mail. But twenty-five states and the District of Columbia have gone beyond this. Eighteen require all voters to produce some form of ID, which may be a bank statement or utility bill sent to their address. Two require a photo ID, which may include employee or other unofficial IDs. Arizona requires all voters to produce either one government-issued ID or two other identifications. Indiana stands alone in requiring that the ID have a photo and be issued by the government--the most difficult forms of identification to obtain. Voters who don't have such IDs are supposed to cast "provisional" ballots, which will be counted only if they show up at election headquarters with a proper ID within a few days of the voting.
The more restrictive the law, the greater the likelihood that it will tip a close election by turning away legal voters--mostly the poor, minorities and the elderly. It's not a coincidence that these voters tend to vote Democratic. In fact, the State of Indiana, in its filings with the Supreme Court, admits that the litigation represents "politics by other means." This flippant attitude toward the right to vote permeates the state's argument. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has shown signs that it shares the view that turning voters away from the polls is constitutionally unimportant.
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No one on either side of the issue disputes that voter fraud occurs. But study after study has made clear that documented fraud is almost exclusively confined to absentee ballots. Absentee voting is one area where Republicans have traditionally out-organized Democrats; the new voter ID laws make almost no reforms to the absentee-vote system.
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The obsession with voter fraud has been orchestrated by the Republican Party, with Karl Rove playing a significant role. The US Attorney firings scandal under Alberto Gonzales seems to have stemmed, in part, from Republicans' desire to push federal prosecutors into going after voters' rights and poor people's groups like ACORN for their turn-out-the-vote activities. In Wisconsin, voter fraud prosecutions netted convictions of a number of small-fish activists who mishandled registration cards and individual voters who filled out two registration cards or attempted to vote despite being convicted felons or on criminal probation. Prosecutors have lost more than half the cases they've brought. In Washington, where Democrat Christine Gregoire narrowly defeated Dino Rossi for governor in 2004, officials of the Justice Department removed US Attorney John McKay, who refused to bring voter fraud charges tied to the election.
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