A solution searching for a problem

Voter ID bills are expensive threat to a constitutional right

 

THE WEEKEND COLUMN

Your civics teacher got part of it wrong.

Mine too.

They told us Congress and state legislatures approved laws to keep democracy safe from evil.

Sometimes that is true. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a good example. With it, Congress awoke from an extended slumber and stopped nefarious powerbrokers from using literacy tests to ban otherwise qualified black voters from casting ballots.

Today, in New Mexico and dozens of other states, we have the opposite of the Voting Rights Act. We have politicians, usually Republicans, proposing that people who have voted for five or 10 or 50 years need particular identification to continue exercising their constitutional right.

The idea of voter identification may sound benign but it is not.

Consider an 85-year-old man in a nursing home who has voted in every election since he backed Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. He has no driver’s license and no mobility, his eyesight and limbs having failed in the dusk of his life. He would have to find a way to re-establish himself as an eligible voter to satisfy able-bodied politicians.

Voter verification bills do not solve any problem. They are a solution in search of a problem.

In 2011, New Mexico Secretary of State Dianna Duran prattled in public about elections being “compromised” by voter fraud. She never provided any evidence of an election being decided by people voting illegally, and the state’s 33 county clerks found there was none.

Even so, two legislators in New Mexico, Republican Reps. Dianne Hamilton, right, and Cathrynn Brown, keep searching for the problem to justify their voter ID bills.

They could look under every rock of Raton Pass and every oil rig in Lea County and still not find evidence of systemic voter fraud.

But Hamilton and Brown want the state to spend millions of dollars and risk taking away the rights of untold voters because they fear somebody could be sullying elections.

Brown last week said she will introduce a voter ID bill for a third consecutive year. Hamilton will join as a cosponsor after four years of offering her own bills.

Hamilton, 78, of Silver City, has been elected to the state House of Representatives eight times. She crushed a well-known Democrat in the November election.

Brown, 55, of Carlsbad, defeated an incumbent Democrat in 2010, a big year for Republicans. She lost to that same fellow in 2008, when the Obama wave swept across most of New Mexico.

If vote thieves are at work, trying to upset the people’s will, how come Hamilton and Brown whipped formidable opponents?

How did Republican Susana Martinez win the governor’s office in a state that leans toward Democrats? And how did that hyperbolic, shoot-from-the-hip conspiracy theorist Dianna Duran ever get elected as a Republican secretary of state if voter fraud was pervasive?

Those in the trenches of election work, the county clerks and poll workers, know that the system and the people running it are mostly honest.

Yes, the occasional case of voter fraud occurs. Most often it involves a desperate politician trying to manipulate absentee ballots.

Still, voter fraud is a fourth-degree felony in New Mexico. Not many people are willing to risk a conviction to try to pad a vote total.

The doubters will never believe that the election system works well and is mostly honest. Many of them have told me they personally have witnessed voter fraud. But when pressed for details, they retreat and their stories shrink to nothing.

Smart politicians know there is an easier way to win than stealing a vote or two and risking prison time for doing it. They try to connect with the apathetic masses, the way Obama did in 2008.

Last summer, New Mexico had 1.2 million registered voters. More than 616,000 other people were eligible to vote but had not registered.

The wicked nutbar who contemplates voter fraud through payoffs would be better off spending his money on a voter registration movement.

But the mythology of widespread voter fraud persists, fueled by the very politicians who have won elections.

Their claims are as much a part of New Mexico as the legend of a UFO crash in Roswell in 1947. And they are just as credible.

Comments

[climbto350]

Not true. We require an ID to perform many tasks, driving an automobile, flying an aircraft, etc. The real reason that liberals are so against positive voter ID, is that the leftist idealogs want desperately to skew the voter base and therefore insure a leftist agenda is sustainable in the future. There are no arguments that do not support positive voter ID as as way to cast a ballot in this country. Insuring that one is, who they claim to be, only makes sense. It is easy to obtain a State issued ID. If the ones who want to vote care enough to make it to the polls, they will find a way to make it to the local DMV to get an acceptable ID. This requirement in no way, violates anyones constitutional right.

[Bale]

Shamefully, GOP leaders around the country have admitted that they use tactics like voter intimidation, Voter ID, and voter purge in order to reduce the amount of minority voters. The GOP only supports the constitution when it benefits them. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/13/michael-tomasky-on-how-the-gop-plans-to-block-the-black-vote.html

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/08/hans_von_spakovsky_helped_rick_scotts_office_with.php

[Hillary]

The last line of this article had me in stitches since I had read a comment from a poll that said that UFO sightings are more common than Voter Fraud. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/voter-id-laws-charts-maps