Old and Busted: Poll Taxes; New Hotness: Voter ID

Under the bromide of “voter fraud,” 34 states have enacted, or are considering enacting, voter identification laws which require voters to have a state-issued photo ID and then present that ID in order to vote. No ID, no voting.

Voter fraud is the number one reason given for the necessity of IDs; without voter IDs, it is argued, massive amounts of ineligible voters — convicted felons, illegal immigrants — would vote. Indeed, even eligible voters might vote more than once! Voter fraud is so important to some people in positions of power that the Justice Department under President George W. Bush allegedly fired attorneys who failed to prosecute enough voter fraud cases.

To be fair to the attorneys, it’s a little difficult to secure prosecutions because, well, voter fraud hardly ever happens. David Schultz, writing for the Harvard Law & Policy Review in 2008, concluded that voter fraud was insignificant. Many others, before and since, have come to the same conclusion. The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law estimates that voter fraud happens at a rate between 0.00004% and 0.0009%. Voter fraud happens, but it happens at rates that are detectable only by laboratory instruments.

But this middling little fact hasn’t stopped conservative legislators from instituting voter ID requirements.

Nor are these your grandpa’s voter ID requirements. Voting laws these days come bundled together in pernicious value-packs. In North Carolina, legislators don’t just want to institute ID requirements, which disproportionately affect minorities and the elderly. They also want to cut the early voting period and limit the number of available polling places. In a Kafkaesque twist, a proposed Wisconsin law wouldn’t even permit a voter registration card to serve as adequate voter identification. In total, 13 states will try to institute similar new voting laws.

It should come as no surprise that many of the people who would be disenfranchised by these laws — minorities and the poor — would vote Democratic. In the same way that poll taxes and literacy tests prevented African-Americans in the south from voting for anti-segregation politicians and policies, voter ID requirements, promoted by Republican legislatures looking for an upper hand, suppress eligible (mostly Democratic) votes.

The Justice Department, thankfully, is noticing. DOJ has put South Carolina’s new voter ID law on hold, mostly because the Voting Rights Act prohibits some southern states from modifying their voting laws without federal clearance. (A history of discrimination and all that.) But this wouldn’t stop voter ID laws in other states, like Wisconsin, in which the government has taken a dangerous swing right-ward of late.

On paper, voter ID requirements might seem like a good idea, and voter fraud seems like a good reason to institute those requirements. Back here in reality, voter ID requirements end up disenfranchising minorities, the homeless, and the elderly. The story of the tenuous relationship between “voter fraud” and voter ID speaks not to a systematic abuse of the electoral system, but a sinister attempt to cull the rolls of people who vote for the wrong party.