Voter ID Will Soon Become Law

The battle over true voter identification has been a long time coming in Mississippi, and on November 8, it is pretty apparent it will be enacted into law via a ballot initiative. The opponents haven’t been as organized as those objecting to the Personhood Amendment; of course they don’t have millions of dollars from Planned Parenthood and the ACLU either.

Voter identification has become quite an issue over the last few months as new Republican legislatures (or Democratic in the case of Rhode Island) have been passing laws across the country. As a result, you have your typical liberal backlash from the likes of the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Associated Press. And on a local level, you have your Bill Minor’s. I imagine David Hampton and the Clarion-Ledger will weigh in shortly with a similar position. The emotional stories and the claims of disenfranchised voters, however, are all easily debunked. Here’s a look at the issue from the National Review. There is a reason voter ID laws have been upheld; because no matter what a newspaper editorial or the NAACP may say opponents have not been able to find disenfranchised voters.

Here is a look at voter turnout in Georgia (where voter ID in mandated) and Mississippi (where it obviously isn’t), via the Heritage Foundation:

There was record turnout in Georgia in the 2008 presidential primary election- over 2 million voters, more than twice as much as in 2004 when the voter photo ID law was not in effect (the law was first applied to local elections in 2007). The number of African-Americans voting in the 2008 primary also doubled from 2004. In fact, there were 100,000 more votes in the Democratic primary than in the Republican primary, and the number of individuals who had to vote with a provisional ballot because they had not obtained the free photo ID available from the state was less that 0.01 percent.

In the 2008 general election when President Barack Obama was elected, Georgia, with one of the strictest voter ID laws in the nation, had the largest turnout in its history- more than 4 million voters. Democratic turnout was up an astonishing 6.1 percentage points from the 2004 election when there was no photo ID requirement, the fifth largest increase of any state.

Overall turnout in Georgia went up 6.7 percentage points, the second highest increase in the country and a striking jump even in an election year when there was a general increase in turnout over the prior presidential election. The black share of the statewide vote increased from 25 percent in 2004 to 30 percent in 2008 according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. And according to Census Bureau surveys, 65 percent of the black voting-age population voted in the 2008 election compared to only 54.4 percent in 2004, an increase of over 10 percentage points.

By contrast, the Democratic turnout in the nearby state of Mississippi, also a state with a high percentage of black voters but without a voter ID requirement, increased by only 2.35 percentage points. Turnout in the 2010 congressional election in Georgia was over 2.6 million voters- an increase of almost 500,000 voters over the 2006 election. While only 42.9 percent of registered black Georgians voted in 2006, 50.4 percent voted in 2010 with the voter ID law in effect, an increase of over 7 percentage points. As Georgia’s secretary of state recently pointed out, when compared to the 2006 election, voter turnout in 2010 “among African Americans outpaced the growth of that population’s pool of registered voters by more than 20 percentage points.”

And here is information from the secretary of state’s website in Georgia on voter ID including what is required, numbers you can call for more information, and details on how to obtain a free ID card at any county office.

Yes, that free ID card that is the equivalent of a poll tax according to some. It is unfortunate that liberals do injustice to a sad part in the nation’s history by comparing the two but here is what the courts said when that argument was made regarding the law in Georgia:

[Such an argument] represents a dramatic overstatement of what fairly constitutes a “poll tax.” Thus, the imposition of tangential burdens does not transform a regulation into a poll tax. Moreover, the cost of time and transportation cannot plausibly qualify as a prohibited poll tax because those same “costs” also result from voter registration and in-person voting requirements, which one would not reasonably construe as a poll tax.

Perhaps this is why voter ID has strong support across the country, as we will soon see in Mississippi. According to polling from June, 75 percent of voters support the photo identification requirement, including 85 percent of Republicans, 77 percent of independents, and 63 percent of Democrats. Yet try finding a Democratic politician who supports voter ID.

And it is possible that when opponents look at the actual numbers, rather than the rhetoric, they will begin to change their minds as was the case with former Alabama Congressman Arthur Davis, an African-American. Writing in the Montgomery Adviser, he opined:

When I was a congressman, I took the path of least resistance on this subject for an African American politician. Without any evidence to back it up, I lapsed into the rhetoric of various partisans and activists who contend that requiring photo identification to vote is a suppression tactic aimed at thwarting black voter participation.

The truth is that the most aggressive contemporary voter suppression in the African American community, at least in Alabama, is the wholesale manufacture of ballots, at the polls and absentee, in parts of the Black Belt.

The fact that a law that is unlikely to impede a single good faith voter- and that only gives voting the same elements of security as writing a check at the store, or obtaining a library card- is controversial does say much about the raw feelings in our current politics.

The case for voter ID, however, is a good one, and it ought to make politics a little cleaner and the process of conducting elections much fairer. I wish I’d gotten it right the first time.

But, as a fair warning, the rhetoric will not stop on November 8. But based on similar court rulings, Mississippi should be good regardless of what the Justice Department tries to do.