Voter Suppression in Missouri
The New York Times | Editorial
Thursday 10 August 2006
Missouri is the latest front in the Republican Party's campaign
to use photo ID requirements to suppress voting. The Republican
legislators who pushed through Missouri's ID law earlier this year
said they wanted to deter fraud, but that claim falls apart on close
inspection. Missouri's new ID rules - and similar ones adopted last
year in Indiana and Georgia - are intended to deter voting by blacks,
poor people and other groups that are less likely to have driver's
licenses. Georgia's law has been blocked by the courts, and the
others should be too.
Even before Missouri passed its new law, it had tougher ID
requirements than many states. Voters were required, with limited
exceptions, to bring ID with them to the polls, but university ID
cards, bank statements mailed to a voter's address, and similar
documents were acceptable. The new law requires a government-issued
photo ID, which as many as 200,000 Missourians do not have.
Missourians who have driver's licenses will have little trouble
voting, but many who do not will have to go to considerable trouble
to get special ID's. The supporting documents needed to get these,
like birth certificates, often have fees attached, so some
Missourians will have to pay to keep voting. It is likely that many
people will not jump all of the bureaucratic hurdles to get the
special ID, and will become ineligible to vote.
Not coincidentally, groups that are more likely to vote against
the Republicans who passed the ID law will be most disadvantaged.
Advocates for blacks, the elderly and the disabled say that those
groups are less likely than the average Missourian to have driver's
licenses, and most likely to lose their right to vote. In close
elections, like the bitterly contested U.S. Senate race now under way
in the state, this disenfranchisement could easily make the
difference in who wins.
The new law's supporters say its purpose is to deter fraud. But
there is little evidence of "imposter voting," the sort of fraud that
ID laws are aimed at, in Missouri or anywhere else. Groups in
Missouri that want to suppress voting have a long history of crying
fraud, but investigations by the Justice Department and The St. Louis
Post-Dispatch, among others, have refuted such claims in the past. If
the Legislature really wanted to deter fraud, it would have focused
its efforts on absentee ballots, which are a notorious source of
election fraud - and are not covered by Missouri's new ID
requirements.
Because of the important constitutional issues these laws raise,
courts will have the final say. Federal and state judges have already
blocked Georgia's ID law from taking effect, and although Indiana's
law was upheld earlier this year, that ruling is on appeal. Missouri
voting-rights advocates recently filed suit against their state's law.
Unduly onerous voter ID laws violate equal protection, and when
voters have to pay to get the ID's, they are an illegal poll tax.
They are also an insult to democracy, because their goal is to have
elections in which eligible voters are turned away.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/081006G.shtml
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