The New York Sun has a column by Patrick McIlherhan of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about Indiana’s Voter ID law. It contains arguments I view as specious. But, that’s not why I’m writing this. That battle is over, the good guys lost. No help for it now but to elect different legislators and change the law, preferably to impose a duty on the government to actively work to get ID into the hands of its citizens.
No, the reason I write is to congratulate Indiana Barrister’s Abdul for his recent apparent promotion. That’s Professor Hakim-Shabazz to you! (Though, I confess, I haven’t checked his identification or other credentials to verify his elevation to a professorship at the unspecified Indianapolis law school.)
“There’s always some incidental costs to voting — you can’t come to the polls naked,” an Indianapolis law professor, Abdul Hakim-Shabazz, who served on the task force that wrote the rules, says. The remarkable thing is that for all the talk of disenfranchisement, Indiana has had seven elections since, and those challenging the law have yet to turn up a plaintiff who credibly can say the law stymied him, Mr. Hakim-Shabazz says. (A dozen nuns, give or take, notwithstanding — Doug)
. . .
There is a decent trade-off to be made between access and security, and Indiana seems to have found it. “I never thought Indiana would be the model for the country of how to do anything,” Mr. Hakim-Shabazz says. It isn’t, not yet at least, but it ought to be.
More seriously, there was a task force for this? On which Abdul was a member? I missed that completely.
Maybe Ivy Tech has become the state’s new law school, Doug.
Doug,
I was surprised at the promotion too. I teach business law for UIndy’s MBA program. And was on the committee that helped promote Voter ID education, but when does the press every get it right? :-) I still think my voter ID arguments were cool and right on the money.
“Professor” can be used for anyone who teaches at a university level. It doesn’t necessarily denote any particular type of degreed status. It’s a courtesy, if you will.
Know why Jimmy Carter was on board about voter I.D.? Long ago he nearly had a election stolen away from him in Georgia, by someone using large-scale voter fraud.
The stakes in winning elections are becoming more and more important. For some, the “end” justifies the “means”. It always has.
The thing I agree with is that it should be incumbent upon the State to assist those motivated citizens to acquire the required documentation for I.D.
For most, it’s only about billable hours spent on pathetic attempts at appeal.
Doug sez “preferably to impose a duty on the government to actively work to get ID into the hands of its citizens.”
How is offering a free photo I.D. to anyone who wants one NOT actively working to get I.D. into the hands of it’s citizens???????
I simply cannot fathom how ANYONES position could be “opposed” to showing a photo I.D. to vote. It seems the very definition of common sense, to prove who you are. Why is that so difficult for Democrats to accept? Seriously?? Why?
Tim, it’s the hoops you have to go through to get one. You have to obtain a copy of your birth certificate (most if not all counties *do* charge for that), you have to have something to prove you live at your address (I think this would have been difficult for the nuns who get no bills, don’t have bank accounts, and file no taxes). You have to get yourself to the BMV (some counties only have one and remember, these are people who don’t drive).
BTW, anyone other than me see the irony in that two of the seven “Valid Proof of Indiana Residency” options are:
An Indiana Identification Card
Voter registration card
Oh, and do remember to tell them it is for voting purposes – otherwise they will still charge you the $13 fee:
Identification Card – 6 Year 13.00
Identification Card For Voting Purposes – 6 Year FREE
A free I.D. doesn’t do soemone who cannot easily acquire a primary identification document much good.
For some, acquiring an out-of-state birth certificate is sometimes a very trying exercise.
If the SoS really wanted to make whole wheat political hay, he set up a program that would help people in getting the proof they need, if they have trouble.
The SoS doesn’t appear to be interested in making anything more than political hay out of part of the wheat grain. And also doesn’t appear interested in helping people through the transition from “we believe you” I.D. to documented I.D.
so abdul’s position is that those nuns are not credible?
Most law professors have nothing more than the JD degree that is required to practice law (albeit earned with better grades than most of us). The confusion is that the term “law professor” is most commonly understood to mean “professor at a law school.”
I’m just ribbing Abdul because it’s fun.
I have a bit more of a problem with the author of that piece since he’s apparently trying to assert Abdul’s teaching credentials as adding authority to his opinions on Voter ID. Those rise or fall on their own merits, like mine. Unless he’s researching and teaching voting law for a living, I’d say he, like me, is just a guy with a J.D. and an opinion.
I agree that the article’s author was plumping Abdul up to add credibility to his writings.
ROFLMAO.
I guess I’ll wade into the merits of the anti-voter impersonation legislation. First of all, it annoys me because the purported rationale is almost certainly a pretext. If there were any strong or even moderate evidence that people were altering election results by going to the polls and impersonating other voters, you can be positive we would have heard about it by now.
In response, I keep hearing the Rumsfeldian notion that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Just as with Iraqi WMDS: pretext.
Indiana legislators are not, by nature, a pro-active bunch of people. Why, suddenly, on this particular issue? It’s pretty clear to me that the point of the exercise is to add a level of bureaucracy to the voting process. The beauty of this particular bureaucracy is that it pretty much only affects Democrats in terms of voting. Very few people who don’t work within the system enough to already have an ID as a matter of course are likely to vote Republican.
So, my problem with the legislation, aside from annoyance at pretextual justifications, is not with voters identifying themselves; but, rather, it’s with the bureaucratic hoops necessary to obtain the proper identification. Most of us find it necessary to go through those hoops for reasons unrelated to voting — for example, we like to drive.
But not all do or can. If government assumed the burden of identifying and providing its citizens with the necessary documentation, I wouldn’t have much to complain about.
Give people, at least two weeks to vote,maybe even an entire month,including weekends.Make all of November ‘the voting month’.Set up a verifiable signature program where people could mail in votes.
There are ways to verify who people are by signature,and machine checked, that don’t require photo ID. Let people ask to have someone come by their house and take their vote.That could be set up within a long voting time period.
Let people vote at any government office.That could also be verified.
It’s time to bring grassroots democracy to America.
Limiting who votes has always helped Republicans maintain control..Let’s call it like it is.
All of the above steps may not be feasible,but at least let’s have to emphasis to enfranchise voters, not to disenfranchise them.
Indiana is one state but the voting concerns are similar in every state.
We have heard about it.
To illustrate, let me chat about a jury experience I had once.
It was a criminal trial concerning something parents don’t like worrying about.
The evidence presented was clear enough for an average thinker to conclude that a set of illegal acts had occurred. The defense failed to provide a reasonable doubt as to the verity of the prosecutor’s case.
Yet, one juror seemed to believe that “beyond a reasonable doubt” meant that he had to witness the crimes himself, or he had to doubt the evidence. He argued for hour upon hour that without direct evidence (of his own), he had to doubt that the defendant was guilty.
Despite compelling evidence to the contrary, this juror persisted in a self-delusion based upon inaccurate definitions and information.
This is what I see opponents of voter I.D. doing. The blinders are on, and they can’t see what is right in front of their faces.
Is it political? Get out of here! What isn’t? Don’t try to pull that argument out to wear as your reason to be shocked. Is it a pretext? Maybe, but for what? Keeping Democrats from voting. That is like sticking your thumb in the dike to keep the Zuider Zee out. It ain’t for real.
Now, I agree that this law could have done more to aid people when they run into bureaucratic roadblocks. This law isn’t perfect, and if it is found to be a pretext for disenfranchisement (real, not by choice), then I’ll be among the rest trumpeting on the rooftops for amendment. So far, it isn’t (12 crotchety old nuns, notwithstanding).
Sometime, let’s discuss “pretext” and “WMDs in Iraq”. I rather think it shows how two separate world leaders got caught up in their own miscalculations in international poker.
Doug,
No offense taken, my friend. I still maintain though that Voter ID has been the law for a couple years and we’ve had seven elections. And no one can produce a plaintiff who’s been disenfranchised. Meanwhile, the May 2007 primary in Marion County… You get my drift. If you can’t get an ID in two years, maybe you should stay home.
That reminds me of my brief television career (i.e. 15 seconds on the Albuquerque evening news back in 1988). I was at a national Student Congress convention, and I forget who was speaking, but they talked about low voter participation and how we had a government of, by, and for the interested few. I stood up and asked whether it would be preferable to have government of, by, and for the disinterested many. As I recall, I didn’t get a satisfactory response. (I was a good little conservative back then.)
Every so often I still get irritated by the notion that people without the inclination to educate themselves about the issues or constitutional basics have votes that county just as much as mine.
But, if I were going to filter out voters so that only the “deserving” got to vote, I’d probably go with a test on basic knowledge of the Bill of Rights or something instead of ability to navigate the BMV’s bureaucracy.
Can we remove the “some people can’t get themselves to the BMV” point from the debate? If they have to somehow transport themselves to the voting booth, they can do the same to get an ID.
However, I do agree that the BMV is very screwy when it comes to how they do ID. Brenda’s point is a good one! That tells me we need to fix the BMV’s process, though, rather than throw out voter ID.
Killing voter ID because the BMV is dumb is admitting that the BMV can’t be fixed, and I think they can be.
The question is whether they can/should have to get themselves to two different places on two separate occasions instead of just one in order to be afforded a right to vote. If you have to do these things to drive or to rent a movie but can’t, tough luck, those things aren’t rights. The right to vote is one of the most basic rights and so, burdens of any kind have to be examined more closely.
Jason said:
doug linked to a story in this very post about twelve nuns who were disenfranchised. why exactly do you believe these nuns aren’t credible plaintiffs? it’s ironic you would make this claim considering varangian’s comment immediately above yours.
To illustrate my point above, Allen County, for example, has 309 active voting precincts,but only 3 BMV license branches
However, I may have “misspoken” (grin) as to driving 70 miles to get to a BMV. I’ve found a 36 miles (RT) for Brown County (only BMV is in Nashville). For the record, they have 12 active voter precincts.
The voter ID law doesn’t bother me much — it probably is not needed, but it seems doubtful that many election outcomes are changed because of it.
The increasing prevalence of absentee voting bothers me more. Absentee ballots are vulnerable to a host of irregularities simply because they are not truly secret ballots.
46 miles RT in Doug’s home county of Tippecanoe – from lower left corner of county to the branch in Lafayette (the only other branch is in West Lafayette which would be 48 miles RT).
Carroll County: 50 miles RT
Knox County: 62 miles RT
(This is the kind of crap research you can do when you are self-employed.)
Re:The twelve nuns in South Bend.
Please take a few moments to re-read the article. The women chose not to get I.D.
That is not disenfranchisement. They made a concious choice. It wasn’t that they couldn’t get I.D. It wasn’t whether it was difficult or easy. It was because they elected not to. That was their vote in the primary. Free and aboveboard.
Why people who choose not to obtain I.D. are labeled “disenfranchised” amazes me. It is an interpretation that is based on – nothing – but the hopes of opponents who have nothing better to offer. The majority of SCOTUS thought it was a bogus argument. Why can’t I?
Because we get to argue with you. :) (There’s a quip floating around to the effect that “The Supreme Court’s decisions are right because they’re final; not final because they’re right.”)
Also, the Justices were facing a facial challenge to the statute — meaning, the Plaintiffs were asserting that there was no way the statute could be applied constitutionally. They left the door open for an “as applied” challenge — meaning that the statute violated someone’s constitutional rights in a particular case. Presumably the nuns and the various students who appeared in the newspapers could file new challenges. I’m not saying they’d be successful, mind you. But, it’s still a possibility.
Found it… Warren County – some residents have to go 79 miles RT to get to their BMV.
Whoops… correction… Vermillion County (sorry, they are the people living up near the Warren County border)
I have a lot of patients who are elderly with limited mobility, poor eyesight, etc. Often it is a struggle to get them to come in when needed due to their dependence on others for transportation. They used to be able to exercise their right to vote in person with one trip. Now it takes two. For some, that is an unreasonable burden for something that is a basic right.
If the elderly were a core Republican constituency, this law wouldn’t exist. They’ve just finally hit on a legal poll-tax, that’s all.
The biggest reason to be suspicious of whether the true intention of this law is to actually reduce voter fraud rather disenfranchise non-republicans is because they didn’t even address absentee voting.
I also wonder how ‘There is a decent trade-off to be made between access and security’ works with ‘Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.’ Oh well. That was only Franklin.
The stated rationale for the voter ID law is a complete crock of shit.
If you want to steal an election, go right for the tender underbelly–the voting machines. God knows ES&S and Diebold aren’t making the task any harder.
Who robs a bank and demands a hundred thousand bucks in quarters?
A bank? Well, no.
Coke machine?
Getting an Indiana ID is much more difficult than many people realize. I am a 62-year-old female who does not drive. For many years I have used my U.S. passport as my official ID because I saw no reason to deal with the BMV. Now I know why.
Because my passport was due to expire just before the election and I have an airplane trip planned, I decided to brave the BMV and get a state ID. A friend drove me to the Nora license branch in Indianapolis where I presented the following pieces of identification: (1) a valid U.S. Passport; (2) a certified birth certificate from the State of Texas; (3) a 2007 W-2 form from Indiana University; (4) a week-old pay stub with my name, address and SSN from a municipal corporation; (5) a Marion County voter registration card, and (6) a card from the Indiana Supreme Court stating I am an attorney in good standing with the State of Indiana.
Not good enough. Why? Because I had no Social Security card with my current name.
I tried again at the Michigan Road branch where the people were nicer but the message was the same. In order to get a state ID, they said, I would have to (1) go to the Social Security Administration in person and apply for a duplicate Social Security card and (2) after I received it in the mail, go back again in person to apply for one in my current/new name and (3) return to a license branch.
When I explained that could not happen in time for the election and I had voted in every federal election since 1946, I was told “too bad.”
So I voted absentee, renewed my passport in less than a week and vowed to never get an Indiana ID. I recommend getting a U.S. Passport; it’s more expensive but alot less trouble.
Oh — my favorite part was “Tia” at the Nora Branch telling me that the State of Indiana — my former employer — did not recognize my name as being linked to my SSN. She didn’t get it when I asked if she wanted to help me apply for 30+ years of tax refunds.
Just to keep things interesting, here’s how they vote in Mexico:
http://www.vdare.com/awall/voter_registration.htm
Whoops — That would be every election since 1968.
Branden, point well made on the machines. I keep waiting for the one Wired Mag created to show up.
In fact, assuming your the Branden of Debian fame, are you involved with any OSS voting projects? We really could use something like this, and I think it could be done such a way to prevent fraud and tampering, solving many problems at once (even if you don’t see fraud as an issue).
Doug, I agree that the door was left open (as it should have been).
Paula is right that absentee voting is the loophole.
ID issue. Had you changed your last name perhaps? Everyone needs to remember to keep the Driver’s License up-to-date. Name and address both. You’re not doing yourself any favors be not doing so. The InGov website has all the scoop on the rules for voter I.D. Ignorance is not an excuse (and it never has been, no matter how old one is, even 98).
Last name has not changed since 1968. In fact it’s the only name I’ve used in Indiana. The “problem” is that my SSN dates from 1960 and BMV insists on a “current” Social Security card.
ID Issue makes me think of an interesting hypothetical.
Would a person be prosecutable under the Voter ID law if he or she present a forged state ID card with one’s actual information on it?
I.e., if it’s this fucking hard to get a license to vote, I smell a market opportunity for black market identity documents. I’m sure those guys would love to branch out from their existing clientele of undocumented immigrants.
Moreover, how trained are poll workers going to be in identifying a forged ID when the only evidence of forgery is the incidentals of the physical card (i.e., all the data on the card is exactly as it would be if issued by the BMV)?
It might make for an interesting test case: If, but for the inefficiency of the state bureaucracy (a trait decried by conservatives under most other circumstances), a voter could have exercised his or her right to vote, has that right been infringed by the voter ID law, and, furthermore, in what sense can we call the voter’s ballot an example of “vote fraud”?
Additionally, given a sufficient increase in demand, make the document forgers more sophisticated and their product harder to detect–an ironic outcome for Messcian-lynching, electrify-the-Southern-border contingent.
(Then again, xenophobic conservatives as a rule don’t have a very well-developed sense of irony–everything that goes wrong is just yet another test of faith from God/Hayek/Reagan/Friedman.)
Jason,
That’s me, but I’m not involved with any OSS-oriented voting system projects.
My somewhat-informed opinion is that machine-readable paper ballots are perfectly adequate until and unless we adopt an election method (such as a Condorect a.k.a. Instant Round-Robin Voting method) that is both tedious to hand-count and a stellar improvement over First-Past-the-Post.
T,
When you find a Coke machine with four hundred thousand quarters in it, get back to me. :)
(I’d hate to be the poor sumbitch responsible for refilling the coin reservoir…)
Is there a trend here on how isues are framed? The only recent legislation that conservative Republicans have proposed that is ‘comprehensive’ has been immigration reform and then only because they fear losing the significant Hispanic vote. HIspanic political leadership won’t distinguish between illegal and legal immigrants as many others do.
Proposed abortion legislation never addresses pregnancy and child birth and children as a comprehensive family concept.Can’t life be defined as ‘conception to death’? Why government intervention sometimes and not others? It’s time to broaden perspectives.
The voter ID law is another example of myopic issue framing since doesn’t address the broader issue which is voting irregularities in general,the greatest of which may be people not allowed to vote who are legal or not counting votes once they are cast,and safer procedures concerning absentee ballots: all pointed out above.
Let’s see if Obama can change the thinking spectrum in Washinton. That’s what’s most impressed me about him: how he frames issues in such comprehensive broad perspectives.. To be sure, he has to be more specific than he has been,and that’s where he’s rightfully been most criticized.But let’s give him a few points for his broader scope on issues.It’s important for a candidate to let us know how wide he can see before he starts to specify individual concerns.
So, given what ID Issue says, the 98 year old nun without a social security card would be doing a lot of driving/riding in order to vote. 98 year old nuns tending to live in the same location for a LONG time (we have a monk in our local archabbey who has lived there since 1918), it seems like common sense should be able to prevail here.
T, you are hilarious.
Government and common sense. Where do you get these odd ideas?
By and large, most legislation is enacted to benefit the populice at large. There will ALWAYS be somebody somewhere that will not directly benefit and/or suffer from ANY legislation. Taking into consideration the common sense portion of the issue, there are bound to be voters out there with proper I.D. and all, but overslept, or missed the bus, or their car broke down, etc etc etc and therefore they couldn’t make it to the polls and cast their vote. Are we to simply give everyone a do-over when personal circumstances stand in their way?
Just like everyone in a free country, you have the right to vote, but you don’t have the right to ask all of us to get you out of bed, get you an I.D., make you breakfast, buy you a car, or give you a ride.
How can anything so simple be warrant such opposition.
Mostly because of the lack of any demonstrable need coupled with the apparent indifference to election issues for which there is some evidence of trouble.
Doug, there was no demonstrable need for locks on cockpit doors either, it doesn’t mean there shouldn’t have been (obviously). Granted, that’s a pretty “sensational” analogy, but it’s a valid argument that just because it hasn’t happened yet is no reason to NOT prepare for it happening.
The opposition to this relies on pointing out that no known cases were reported, while at the same time since this legislation has been in force, no cases have cited where it disenfranchised any voters. (You can’t count the nuns, they made a concious decision to NOT follow the law, or simply vote absentee)
In order to make a convincing argument that the Republicans who pushed hard for this legislation were merely being good boy scouts following the “be prepared” motto, I think you need to figure out why more pressing concerns like absentee voters or mandating paper trails for electronic voting were not addressed.
The nuns are a valid example because they are people who would have voted but for this law. You can make the argument that complying with the extra burden imposed by this law was so trivially easy that the nuns themselves are more culpable than the legislature for them not being able to vote. But, the fact is that it was this extra procedural burden that caused them not to vote. Had this procedural burden not been imposed, they would have voted last Tuesday.
tim: you’re right that your analogy is sensational, but wrong about it being valid. for one thing, you seem to think that no planes had ever been hijacked before 9/11, which is far from the truth.
more importantly, “it’s never happened before but could someday” is such a low standard that it could be used to justify pretty much anything. how about concentration camps? there’s no demonstrable need for them yet, but who knows what the future may bring?
Tim–
Al Gore’s terrorism task force recommended locks on the cockpit doors for precisely the reason we now all know it is a good idea. That task force was beginning to present its recommendations to congress when Bush preempted it by assigning terrorism to Cheney, who prioritized it somewhere after his energy task force. Then 9/11 happened. Just another case where we had to have things demonstrated to us rather than listening to that wooden egghead Ozone Man.
Doug, I make no such argument the repubs did it because they were boyscouts etc. The reason WHY it was introduced and passed is a moot point.
The fact is, regardless the reason enacted, it is NOT burdensome as evidenced by the other the many other states using similar laws and of course by the SCOTUS decision.
For most Americans, it just makes perfect sense to ask for a photo I.D. to cast a ballot.
I tire of the back and forth. Some believe one thing, others believe something else. Rhetoric up to this point has altered no one’s opinion that I can tell. Must mean we’re all failures in debate.
I’ll admit I’m biased in the nuns’ case. It’s simple scales of justice thing to me. 40+ years of likely rapping little kids on the knuckles with a ruler because they aren’t doing what they’re told. Now, the shoe is on the other foot and the poor old nuns can’t vote the way they want. Boo-blankety-hoo.
Frankly, I could pull out Federal case documents regarding voter fraud convictions in Indiana and most opponents still wouldn’t be swayed.
Worried about Indiana’s law? Better start paying attention to Missouri. Todd Rokita will look like a milquetoast in comparison.