The Poll Tax .. er, Make That "Voter ID Law"

A number of states have passed, or are in the process of passing, laws that effectively toughen up the standards for identification of voters at the polls.   Personally, I believe it's just basic common sense that someone who shows up intending to cast a ballot should be able to present reasonable evidence that he/she is eligible to do so.  End of story?  Not quite.

That's certainly the ideal.  Yet we know that in this country we have a long history of seemingly quite logical, reasonable prerequisites being implemented by unscrupulous politicians - often in unequal or discriminatory fashion - because of their potential effect at the polls -- laws that were part of the fabric of voting in the U.S. South for far too many years, like  "poll taxes," property requirements, literacy tests -- that were generated mainly as bars to Negro/black/African-American voting.   It was these practices that put many Southern states and their election practices under a watching brief from the U.S. Department of Justice.

And that's why any reasonable person might smell a rat when the voter ID laws, despite protestations by those who advocate them that they're just reasonable measures to prevent voter fraud, are characterized by curious coincidences:

• Nowhere in the nation do election boards report the existence of serious voter fraud problems;
• Even proponents acknowledge that certain categories of citizens (including African-Americans, Latinos, the poor, and the elderly, apparently) are disproportionately affected, and that many of those groups coincidentally tend to vote Democratic;
• All but one state that has recently legislated such measures has a Republican governor (the exception has an independent governor);
• No state has said much about what prevented them from simply implementing an effective system of voter ID cards years, or decades, ago;
• Many of these states happen to be in the South; and
• The voter ID laws are being fast-tracked to be in place before November elections.

That's a lot of coincidence.  So, while I still believe it's not unreasonable for voters to establish their eligibility with an ID, there's enough doubt about these regulations being rushed through state legislatures that we clearly should take a pause in implementing them.  Otherwise all these good-faith efforts to stamp out voter fraud might lead us to suspect that Jim Crow is alive and well, and residing in the hearts of many politicians who oppose the reelection of Barack Obama (coincidentally, an African-American.) 

I also am of the view that the standards and procedures for the election of federal officials (and probably others too) should be established by federal authority, not states.  So I think I have the solution:   After our pause, but before our Congressional elections in 2014, let's establish a national ID card.  It would do away with all these problems (and many others) and given how earnest our state governors and legislators are about dealing with voter fraud, I'm sure they'd leap at the idea. 

Comments

[Gabbygeezer]

Good proposal. This rush to State IDs is disturbing. We could use a modern version of the old Social Security card as the "new" national ID. I'm told technologies now exist that can make ID cards nearly fool proof.