In the wake of Robert Kennedy Jr.’s Will The Next Election Be Hacked?, and this conservative leaning NewsMax article, concern for voter fraud is rampant among members of both political parties. In response to these longstanding concerns, in 2005 a bipartisan commission chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, recommended requiring that voters present a photoID to poll workers to prove citizenship prior to voting. In response to the commission’s recommendation, this month the house passed a bill which would do just that. Yet the ACLU argues that photoID legislation would disenfranchise large numbers of infirm, elderly, and poor.
Questions remain: will photoID legislation actually solve the stated problem, is the social cost greater than the problem stated, and are there cheaper alternatives which could meet both goals of reduced voter fraud and increased citizen access to the polls?
Voter Fraud has a long history, both in the United States and throughout the world. It is not a new phenomenon. In the former Soviet Union, elections were rigged by simply controlling who was on the ballot, leaving voters with the farce of no political choice among two candidates of the same party. Mexico too has a long history of single party rule under the PRI and election tampering. As does China, the former Iraq under Ba’athist control, and many other third world nations. It should be of no surprise, then, that election rigging has been a common complaint throughout United States history, from the 1800’s Tammany Hall controversies to Mayor Richard Daley, elected six times from 1955 to his death in 1976. It is no surprise then that both the 2000 and 2004 US Presidential elections were also mired by claims of election rigging and voter fraud.
The bipartisan commission’s recommendation of requiring a photoID before entering the voting booth is highly controversial, and possibly unconstitutional. State court judges in both Missouri and Georgia have struck down photoID laws, though these rulings are under appeal. It seems likely that the Supreme Court will be faced with making the final constitutional decision. Yet, even if the photoID law is seemed constitutional, would such a law actually solve the problem of voter fraud?
One type of voter fraud Republicans have voiced repeated concern over is the potential for individuals to vote multiple times. The NewsMax article linked in the intro paragraph quotes a Republican strategest:
“Still, Republican strategists tell NewsMax that by increasing voter registrations in inner city and heavily Democratic areas, there is an increased worry that multiple voting schemes will take place on Election Day.”
C-SPAN’s Washington Journal held a debate on voting rights vs. voter fraud prevention between Tova Wang, of The Century Foundation and Jason Torchinsky of the American Center for Voting Rights. A video clip of the debate segment is not yet available, however, C-SPAN has published a video of the entire program (rtsp://video.c-span.org/15days/wj092206.rm); simply fast forward to one and a half hours in – it runs for an hour. In the interest of disclose, I should note that I was the first caller in that segment (caller from Somerville, MA), which is my impetus for writing this.
The suggestion I offered in that call is very simple. Given that many Republicans are concerned about multiple-voting fraud by individual voters, a simple solution is to have polling workers ink voters’ fingers after having voted. This technique was used with great success during the 2005 Iraqi national vote, as William Bennett attests in a letter to National Review, where he said:
If there has been one, strong signal and image of those brave efforts, it has been the purple, ink stain on every voting Iraqi’s finger — proving they voted. Those ink stained fingers have been raised with pride in January and October; and we want them raised with pride again next week, as they stand up for freedom and elections in their new democracy.
If it’s a good enough anti-fraud measure for the United States provisional authority to implement in Iraq, why not here in the US as well? For those concerned that a purple finger would be an ugly eye sore for voters, or potentially a violation of voters’ anonymity, ultraviolet ink offers a solution; it’s invisible to the naked eye, yet easily detectable under ultraviolet light.
As Mr. Torchinsky noted in his reply to my on air comment, inking voters’ fingers does not solve every potential means for vote fraud. It won’t prevent noncitizens from voting, for instance. Yet, neither does demanding a photoID. Many illegal aliens use false documents to obtain valid drivers licenses, yet under the proposed law they would have every opportunity to use that license in order to walk into a polling station. To resolve that problem, some also propose that voters be required to present a birth certificate, passport, or some other means of citizenship proof. At what point does the hassle and expense of obtaining all the necessary forms of identification be construed as a Poll Tax intended not to validate citizenship, but simply to place restrictions and difficulties on valid citizens and thus reduce voter turnout? And isn’t proving citizenship the purpose of voter registration – that is, weeding out those who should not have access to the polls prior to voting day? If this proposed bill is signed into law, why perform voter registration at all?
Ms. Wang responded to Mr. Torchinsky by stating (paraphrasing) that there is no evidence of rampant voter fraud among noncitizens, and there are many valid citizens who would be unable to obtain the necessary identification. Further, isn’t such legislation yet one more step toward a National ID, a concept anathema to many conservatives due to its use by most every totalitarian regime. As she put it, (paraphrasing) where is the proportionality between individual voter fraud vs. the cost to society to implement these measures? As seen in the 2004 Presidential election in Ohio (and many other states) long lines forcing as much as eleven hour waits, forced many to leave polling stations without ever having voted. Requiring every voter to present a photoID could only slow already over-long lines at polling stations nationwide.
As with many partisan battles, both sides claim fraud on the other, yet both sides oppose each others’ solutions. The question here should not be: which party offered this proposal, but what does it purport to fix, what will it cost, and will it work? At the very least, why not perform a cost-benefit analysis so that we can know how much implementing this will cost government and citizens before enacting such a law?
I would argue that compared to simply inking the fingers of voters — a remarkably cheap and effective solution to preventing multiple votes — requiring a voter to present a photoID is unreasonably arduous for too many legitimate voters who would be denied access to the polls, potentially damaging to voters’ anonymity (a hallmark of our voting system since the inception of our republic), and likely wouldn’t prevent noncitizen voting anyway.
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Text Copyright ©2006 J. Maynard Gelinas.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Original text and updates archived at daduh.org/node/32
