Senator Errington has introduced SB 5 which expands the permissible forms of voter identification.
Included among the permissible forms of identification are: 1) a current utility bill, bank statement, paycheck, government check, or another government document that shows the name and address of the individual; 2) A driver’s license or state identification card issued by a state other than Indiana; and 3) an affidavit executed by two precinct election officers who are members of different major political parties declaring that they have personal knowledge of the individual and that the individual is the individual whose name appears on the poll list.
Sounds reasonable. It won’t, however, see the light of day in the Republican controlled Senate.
Parker says
2) and 3) look reasonable – but 1) wouldn’t seem to be very stringent. Anybody with a PC and a color printer could fake something up in an hour.
tim zank says
#2 makes a lot of sense: “A driver’s license or state identification card issued by a state other than Indiana;”….uhhhh…wouldn’t an out of state drivers license sort of imply they aren’t from around here?
Jeffrey says
But why would they?
Voter fraud is the perennial fright wig held up by those (i.e., Republicans) who have something to gain by preventing people from voting.
Doug says
No. I had an Ohio driver’s license while living in Indiana between the years 1993 and 1996 while I was in law school at Bloomington. That shouldn’t have been grounds to disqualify me from voting. (The fact that I voted for Ross Perot in 1996 may have been sufficient grounds.)
Lou says
To vote you must be a citizen but to drive a car legally,you just have to have legal status, which can be far short of citizenship..Isn’t that why drivers licenses can’t prove you are llegally qualified to vote? Ive always been confused on this issue. I have to show my drivers license as my voter ID,and it seems such a sham.
I would change the rules for voting and remove citizenship requirement until we all are issued a bonafide national ID card by Uncle Sam,or bring our passports to voting booth.
mary says
“until we all are issued a bonafide national ID card by Uncle Sam, or bring our passports to voting booth.”
Passports for adults cost $100 (almost double that for an expedited one). Not everyone needs/wants a passport. If you don’t have one and want one, the wait to get it can be months. All reasons why passports should not be required to ID a voter, even though they “could” be. But I don’t think you really meant they should be.
Lou says
Mary,
My point was that there is no way to prove anyone who votes is a citizen under our current system of Voter ID. I’ve changed my own view; I used to think that illegals were a problem but how can people we can’t define be a defined problem? Sounds like double talk to me.
Pila says
I imagine that the out-of-state driver’s license/state ID card would be used in conjunction with other evidence that the person was a resident of Indiana. IIRC, the current utility bill, bank statement, etc. can be used in conjunction with other forms of ID to obtain a driver’s license.
ID laws make us (or at least some of us) feel better, but most anyone can find ways around them. Birth certificates, which are not at all proof of identity, are often used as primary documents to obtain other forms of ID, such as driver’s licenses and passports. If someone obtains someone else’s birth certificate, which is fairly easy to do, he or she can get a very real, but fraudulently obtained, driver’s license, social security card, etc. in the identity of the person named on the birth certificate.