If you haven’t been living under a rock, you probably heard something about Indiana’s Voter ID law being headed to the United States Supreme Court.
Indiana has the strictest voter ID law in the country. If we cut through the crap and the posturing, the issue is basically this – the Republicans who passed this law want to suppress voter turnout in the populations who might have trouble producing an ID – those people are more likely to vote for Democrats. The pretext for the law is that it is necessary to combat voter fraud. However, there is no evidence that any such voter fraud was a problem. In fact, where there has been some problem with voter fraud — absentee voting — the General Assembly didn’t take any action. Absentee voters tend to vote Republican, not coincidentally.
Democrats oppose the Voter ID challenge, not necessarily out of any inherent sense of righteousness about the right to vote (though many individual Democrats I’m sure feel that way), but more practically because this law is more likely to reduce the number of votes they get. For whatever reason, the populations who are most distrustful of government documents and who are less sophisticated about obtaining and retaining documentation are more likely to vote for Democrats. Some of this is theoretical, there isn’t apparently hard evidence about how many people are discouraged from voting because of the additional bureaucracy imposed on their right to vote.
So, the question is (in my mind) first, who should have the burden of proof — should the proponents have to prove that this additional bit of red-tape corrects an actual problem? Or, should the opponents have to prove that the additional bit of red-tape actually hurts anybody? I’d go with the first option. When the government chooses to interfere with a Constitutional right, it ought to show that the interference is necessary to correct an actual (rather than theoretical) problem and as minimally burdensome as possible to fix the problem.
But, nobody has appointed me to a court, so my opinion isn’t worth that much.
What’s interesting is that this new law is not just some kooky Hoosier innovation but an extreme part of a national Republican Party coordinated process. Similar but less onerous Voter ID laws were passed in a number of other states which had enough GOP muscle to make it happen.
Oh, it doesn’t seem kooky at all to me. If you’re a political party and you’ve identified a way to reduce the number of people who will vote for your opponents, it’s coldly rational to try to implement the voter suppression strategy.
My father has been disabled for years, and thus has had to vote absentee the last few elections. My parents are very scrupulous about making sure that the ballot shows his choices, but the process could easily be manipulated by less honest people. Dad does not have to show any ID, have a notary sign the ballot, etc.
I remember having to go through a fair amount of rigmarole when I voted absentee in my first year of college. Now, almost anything goes, apparently. It seems to me that it would be much easier to fraudulently vote via absentee ballot than to show up at the polls and try to impersonate someone else. If there is any true concern about fraud, why not make absentee voting more difficult?