If moaning on social media is anything to go by, a lot of young folks in Massachusetts have gotten so jaded with American democracy that they aren’t even bothering to vote anymore.
It seems this a problem several states would kill for—last year, 34 states introduced legislation that would either require voters to present ID or strengthen existing laws in order to require photo ID. Most of these laws have been presented by Republican lawmakers, and when pressed most of them have cited concerns over voter fraud.
Funnily enough, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of significant voter fraud of the type that voter ID laws would address anywhere in the country. According to a report published by News 21, an exhaustive investigation into every reported case of voter elections fraud since 2000 came up with … a whopping 10 cases of voter impersonation, the kind of fraud ID laws are meant to prevent.
With 146 million registered voters, that works out to one fraud for about every fifteen million voters.
Keith Srakocic/Associated Press
Considering that your average American is 15 times more likely to be struck by lightning than to defraud the electoral system, we must ask, why are these laws suddenly such a high priority for so many states? The simplest way to find an answer is to look at what kind of effects these laws will have. Many opponents of voter ID laws claim that they will disproportionally disenfranchise people of color, students, the elderly, and the disabled. According to a report by the Advancement Project, 10 million eligible Latinas could be adversely affected by these laws. For those of you keeping track, that isn’t even enough to guarantee that one fraud will be prevented.
The cynics among us may be tempted to pin this on a concerted effort by the Republican Party to disenfranchise voters who oppose them, and hell, they may be right.
Latinos, one of the groups most likely to be disenfranchised by voter ID laws, are projected to strongly support Barack Obama in November. In Florida alone, Latina voters make up 26 percent of the electorate. Florida will be a swing state in the upcoming presidential election, and it should come as no surprise that legislators attempted to make their already existing ID laws even stricter.
Florida is far from the only swing state shooting for stronger voter ID laws:
Of the “big five” swing states in the upcoming presidential election (Colorado, Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, and Virginia), all except Wisconsin have attempted to tighten their ID laws:
Ohio is the only state where the tightened restrictions were not struck down, and there they are pending in the state senate committee. Wisconsin’s longer-standing voter ID law was recently ruled unconstitutional in March by a state judge and currently is not being enforced.
The big five are far from the only states embroiled in legal battles over their legislation: Pennsylvania, considered to be a minor swing state, enacted a voter ID law this year that has spent most of its short life hung up in the state’s supreme court. The law requires that the state issue IDs to all eligible voters, however, only 8,000 valid non-driver IDs have been issued since the law passed.
The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, which issues the IDs, estimated earlier that some 759,000 Pennsylvania voters would need them.
Photo from AdvancementProject.org.
Eligible voters without the required ID to vote in Pennsylvania make up about 9 percent of the states total electorate.
According to a study by the Brennan Center at the NYU School of Law, 11 percent of the total eligible voters in the country lack the ID that would allow them to vote under the laws in their states. Many of those without IDs do not have a car and lack access to public transportation, and often the government offices that issue these IDs are only open part-time. One notable example is the office in Sauk City, Wisc., which is only open on the fifth Wednesday of every month. Well, at least, the four months that have fifth Wednesdays.
While the citizens bearing the brunt of these laws are some of the most downtrodden in the country, they aren’t without friends. The Department of Justice denied clearance for laws in Texas; in South Carolina, the DOJ is considering doing the same and is expected to make a decision in October. The ACLU is spearheading initiatives to overturn voter ID laws in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and other states. Some of these initiatives have been successful; some have not. But regardless of what kind of ID requirements shake out of the legal proceedings, the message is clear:
If you want a say in the great American “democracy” and you aren’t the right kind of people, you had damn well better be willing to fight for it.