The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Voter Fraud
The myth goes like this: scores of miscreant ineligible voters head to the polls every election – well, especially in 2008 – and, like a Chicago political machine, destroy the sanctity of our democracy with rampant, fiendish voter fraud. In order to preserve our honor, our very freedom, is it too much to ask that we require would-be voters to show ID at the polls?
The answer is yes. Yes it is. Voter fraud, the kind that conservatives attempt to legislate against, patently does not exist. Efforts to prevent legal voters, whether Democratic ones or not, from reaching the polls is itself defrauding our democracy.
Laws requiring government-issued ID in order to vote have germinated in various state legislatures, including Missouri, for the past decade. But it wasn’t until recently that the effort became so centrally coordinated. Top GOP officials – frustrated by the mass of new voters that put Obama over the top in 2008 – embarked on a new push for stricter voter laws. Thanks to a conservative leviathan known as the American Legislative Exchange Council, GOP legislators were essentially handed draft legislation to bring to their state floors. Then, goaded by their 2010 midterm election gains, Republicans saw to it that these measures were incredibly successful in over a dozen states. In the past two years, Virginia, Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Alabama, Kansas, South Carolina, and other states have implemented laws that partially disenfranchise the very demographics – young voters and people of color – that helped catapult Obama to the presidency.
Conservatives say the voter ID crusade marks a righteous battle against fraud. Leaving aside that empirical falsehood for a second, impersonating someone else on November 6th would be a terrible election strategy. At best, you’d get one essentially meaningless incremental vote for your candidate. At worst, your life is ruined. Voter fraud is a felony punishable by 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice concludes that, statistically speaking, you are more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud.
Voter fraud is also rarely observed. Between 2002 and 2007, the Justice Department did not prosecute one single person for impersonating someone else at the polls, and this is really the only kind of election fraud an ID law could stop. In essence, voter ID laws are either a solution in search of a problem or something much more nefarious. Nevertheless, conservatives have effectively conflated voter fraud with election fraud – errors in the poll books or registration record, for example – which is a real phenomenon, but one not remedied by forcing prospective voters to present photo identification. Voter ID laws do nothing to curb fraud, but do everything to prevent legally registered Americans from exercising their right to vote.
“You need a photo ID to get on an airplane,” goes the conservative voter ID canard. “Why shouldn’t you need one to vote?” Who needs the facts if you can construct such a convincing narrative? Of course, the problem here is that flying Delta isn’t an anonymous constitutional right – but that misses the point of the larger success of conservative dogma. It just sounds like a crisp and cogent narrative here. If GOP-lead legislatures across the country are targeting often-marginalized Democratic voters under the guise of a non-existent voter fraud epidemic, why can’t liberals pitch that magnetic story?
“It’s hard to boil it down into a clever sentence,” according to Jeff Smith, a former Washington University professor who served in the Missouri legislature. “Centuries of slavery and discrimination lead to a disadvantaged class of southern black sharecroppers who flee the South in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. They don’t have driver’s licenses. Now they’re 85 years old, have moved a dozen times, and need to track down their birth certificate?” Sounds like a breeze.
The fact is, voter ID laws target a very specific cross-section of society: the 11% of eligible American voters that lack government-issued photo ID. Importantly, poor, minority, and elderly voters – often Democratically-leaning demographics – are especially likely to fall into that segment: 25% of African-Americans, 16% of Hispanics, and 18% of Americans over the age of 65 don’t have photo ID, according to the Brennan Center. Advocates will say that voter ID states offer government-issued ID free of charge, so just go get one, silly! That’s oversimplifying the case according to Washington University professor Jon Rogowski. “To get a driver’s license, for instance, you typically need a couple forms of ID, like a birth certificate or passport. Those documents can be expensive to track down if you don’t already have them, both in terms of time and money. So while free IDs are nice, they don’t go far enough to address the inability of some people to access the documents they need to get the IDs.”
It’s also not exactly easy to transport yourself to an ID-issuing office when, by definition, you do not have a driver’s license. In their extensive study, the Brennan Center notes, “More than 10 million eligible voters live more than 10 miles from their nearest state ID-issuing office open more than two days a week.” In Wisconsin, Alabama, and Mississippi, less than half of ID-issuing offices are open five days a week. Good luck if you’re working full-time in Alabama, Kansas, Mississippi, or Wisconsin, where no office stays open on Saturday. And when open, office hours can be comically idiosyncratic. The ID-issuing office in Sauk City, Wisconsin is only open on the fifth Wednesday of the month. To be sure, only four months have five Wednesdays this year.
All told, a voter ID law could hit quite close to home for Washington University students. Missouri would already have a voter ID law in place if not for the state’s voter-friendly courts. For years, the conservative legislature has attempted to implement stricter laws, including the rejection of student IDs at the polls altogether. “Students would have to show Missouri or state-issued driver’s licenses or a passport,” says Rose Windmiller, the assistant vice chancellor for government and community relations. “You have to be concerned about any kind of fraud, but we have been voting in this manner for many years and there hasn’t been any indication of widespread fraud on the part of voter registration or at the polls.”
Washington University: On November 6th, do your civic duty and go vote. While you still can.