Voter Suppression in
Missouri
EDITORIAL, NYTimes on
the Web, August 10, 2006
Missouri is the latest front in the
Republican Party’s campaign to use photo ID requirements to suppress voting.
The Republican legislators who pushed through Missouri’s ID law earlier this
year said they wanted to deter fraud, but that claim falls apart on close
inspection. Missouri’s new ID rules — and similar ones adopted last year
in Indiana and Georgia — are intended to deter voting by blacks, poor people and
other groups that are less likely to have driver’s licenses. Georgia’s law
has been blocked by the courts, and the others should be too.
Even before Missouri passed its new law, it had tougher ID requirements than
many states. Voters were required, with limited exceptions, to bring ID
with them to the polls, but university ID cards, bank statements mailed to a
voter’s address, and similar documents were acceptable. The new law
requires a government-issued photo ID, which as many as 200,000 Missourians do
not have.
Missourians who have driver’s licenses will have little trouble voting, but many
who do not will have to go to considerable trouble to get special ID’s.
The supporting documents needed to get these, like birth certificates, often
have fees attached, so some Missourians will have to pay to keep voting.
It is likely that many people will not jump all of the bureaucratic hurdles to
get the special ID, and will become ineligible to vote.
Not coincidentally, groups that are more likely to vote against the Republicans
who passed the ID law will be most disadvantaged. Advocates for blacks,
the elderly and the disabled say that those groups are less likely than the
average Missourian to have driver’s licenses, and most likely to lose their
right to vote. In close elections, like the bitterly contested U.S. Senate
race now under way in the state, this disenfranchisement could easily make the
difference in who wins.
The new law’s supporters say its purpose is to deter fraud. But there is
little evidence of “imposter voting,” the sort of fraud that ID laws are aimed
at, in Missouri or anywhere else. Groups in Missouri that want to suppress
voting have a long history of crying fraud, but investigations by the Justice
Department and The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, among others, have refuted such
claims in the past. If the Legislature really wanted to deter fraud, it
would have focused its efforts on absentee ballots, which are a notorious source
of election fraud — and are not covered by Missouri’s new ID requirements.
Because of the important constitutional issues these laws raise, courts will
have the final say. Federal and state judges have already blocked
Georgia’s ID law from taking effect, and although Indiana’s law was upheld
earlier this year, that ruling is on appeal. Missouri voting-rights
advocates recently filed suit against their state’s law.
Unduly onerous voter ID laws violate equal protection, and when voters have to
pay to get the ID’s, they are an illegal poll tax. They are also an insult
to democracy, because their goal is to have elections in which eligible voters
are turned away.
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