Never accuse some Missouri legislators of lacking a sense of political timing. Or cynicism.
As democracy protests rage across the Middle East—with thousands risking their lives demanding the right to vote—our state’s elected representatives are dutifully examining a proposal to do just the opposite.
They’re considering a plan to make it harder to vote in Missouri.
The effort is camouflaged as a voter ID law to prevent fraud at the ballot box. A Senate elections committee passed measures last week calling for a constitutional amendment for a voter ID requirement; a House committee is now going through the motions of “considering” the same political done deal.
By requiring all voters to show a picture ID, the legislators would attack the scourge of thousands of illegal aliens and other unregistered individuals showing up on Election Day and pretending to be individuals who are registered to vote.
This, of course, has never happened in Missouri, and never will. A representative of the secretary of state’s office testified that the state hasn’t seen a single case of voter misidentification.
But for several years, Republicans have been enamored with the prospect of putting the ID hurdle in front of people who don’t have driver’s licenses because it is widely believed that those individuals—the poor, disabled and elderly—are disproportionately Democratic voters.
It’s politically a pretty smart idea. The vast majority of voters have driver’s licenses, and none of them are offended by showing it at the polling place, so sponsors of a voter ID law know they can count on this vast majority to be personally unaffected on Election Day.
The only real-world impact of a voter ID law is that a fair number of people who don’t have photo IDs will not vote because—for whatever reason—they won’t have obtained such an ID. In close elections, of which there are many, this gentle disenfranchisement might provide a victory margin for Republican candidates.
It remains to be seen if Gov. Jay Nixon, indistinguishable from Republicans on many matters of ideology but still a Democrat after all, would veto a voter ID measure and whether it would be overridden. The Republicans have a 106-57 margin in the House, which isn’t quite veto-proof (a two-thirds majority being needed for an override), as is their 26-8 advantage in the Senate.
Yet even if the Republicans fail to get voter ID on a statewide ballot, there’s great political hay to be baled by accusing Democrats of defending voter fraud. Remember that the vast majority of people who are not offended by showing their driver’s licenses on Election Day.
What’s generally left out of the voter ID debate is simple common sense. How is it that dastardly voter-fraud criminal perpetrators are going to use the absence of a photo ID requirement to herd large numbers of illegal voters to the polls?
Understand that for no-photo-ID fraud to work, the fraudsters would need to find illegal voters to impersonate someone whose name is on those printouts that election officials use (and require you to sign) when you go to vote. There would be no reason to use eligible voters: It would be a whole lot less work—and also not felonious—just to get them registered and bring them to the polling place.
So the fraudsters need to find illegal voters and have them impersonate people who are known to be on the voter printouts but who are dead, or otherwise can be counted upon not to have shown up to vote. It would also be important to find illegal voters who are not suspiciously illegal, who have good acting skills and who don’t mind breaking the law for however much you have to pay them.
Oh yes, there’s that: Someone would have to be willing to foot the cost of bringing illegal voters with good acting skills to the polling place—one at a time—to impersonate non-voting registered voters.
Wow, that’s too easy. We better put a stop to that.
After all, as one political scholar recently put it, there’s no such thing as being too diligent when it comes to fighting voter fraud.
I think it was Hosni Mubarak.
SLM co-owner Ray Hartmann is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
