Access denied: the problem with voter ID laws

IN WISCONSIN, voter fraud is rampant. Or so thought U.S. Attorney Steven Biskupic, who began a hunt for fraudulent voters after John Kerry won Wisconsin by just 11,000 votes over George W. Bush in 2004, in an election that Republicans claimed was tainted by widespread voter fraud. But by the time he completed his work, Biskupic reported that he had uncovered no conspiracy to commit fraud. His prosecutors ended up charging only 14 people with voting illegally-and only four of them, all fellons ineligible to vote, were convicted.

Lawmakers in many states are saying that there's only one way to stop this epidemic of fraud: have every voter show ID at the polls--ideally a state-issued photo ID. But experts on elections say that voter fraud of the kind that could be countered by ID requirements is rare. What's more, requiring photo IDs would disenfranchise millions of voters. The supposed remedy, these experts say, would turn out to be far worse than the actual problem.

Since 2002, the Justice Department has made an all-out effort to track down and convict fraudulent voters. By 2006, those efforts had yielded just 86 convictions nationwide, and many of those incidents, like the four Wisconsin cases, would not have been prevented by a voter ID requirement.

Meanwhile, a study by the Brennan Center for Justice (see truthaboutfraud.org) found that some 21 million citizens-including a disproportionately large number of African Americans and elderly people--do not have government-issued photo ID. As many as 4.5 million people have a photo ID that lacks their current address or current legal name; many of these are young adults and people with lower income who move frequently. The proof-of-citizenship requirements that some ID advocates propose are especially onerous for married women: 32 million voting-age women do not have documents to prove citizenship that reflect their current legal name.

Proponents of strict voter ID press their case by magnifying the size of the fraud problem while minimizing the impact of voter ID laws. Ohio is one state that strengthened its ID laws after the 2004 election. The League of Women Voters teamed up with a housing advocacy group there to find out how many cases of individual voter fraud had been pursued in relation to the 2004 presidential election. They came up with a statewide total of four, or 0.00004 percent of the nearly 10 million votes cast.

But to hear voter ID proponents tell the story, fraudulent voters were everywhere in Ohio. One master of magnification is Mark "Thor" Hearne of the American Center for Voting Rights. If Web presence is any indicator of an organization's legitimacy, the ACVR should raise eyebrows: its Web site didn't appear until March 2005, and it disappeared exactly two years later. But after the 2004 election, the ACVR was everywhere, testifying at hearings and filing lawsuits that claimed voter fraud.

Hearne, who was national election counsel for Bush-Cheney '04, was called to testify on behalf of the ACVR before the House Administration Committee--chaired at the time by Bob Ney (R., Ohio), who is now serving prison time for corruption--when that committee was looking into irregularities in the 2004 election. Hearne claimed that fraud was reported "in every corner" of Ohio, and that "the fraudulent voter registrations totaled in the thousands."

Hearne offered the committee this rhetorical flourish: "Ohio citizens deserve the confidence that they the voters--not trial lawyers, activist judges and special-interest groups soliciting fraudulent votes with crack cocaine--determine the result of Ohio elections." He was inspired to include the last example by the case of a hapless addict who did indeed confess to accepting cocaine in lieu of cash as payment for turning in completed registration forms. (The fraudulent forms were spotted because officials wondered why so many people with names like Mary Poppins and Michael Jackson lived on a single block and had the same handwriting. Presumably this is one of the four cases the League of Women Voters discovered. The addict was charged with a felony, and Mary Poppins didn't get to vote.)

Proponents of strict voter ID laws make their recommendations sound like a matter of common sense. "Every day millions of Americans show a picture ID to pay by check, board a plane or buy alcohol or tobacco," argued Vernon J. Ehlers (R., Mich.) when the U.S. House was preparing its own voter ID bill. "Surely the sanctity of the ballot warrants as much protection as these other activities. Our voting rights are too important to rely on an 'honor system.'" Sound bites like these echoed from coast to coast as the bill skated through the House on a near-perfect party-line vote.

But the analogy is not accurate. First of all, it's not true that you have to have an ID to get on a plane. As George Washington University law professor Spencer Overton pointed out in an interview, "If you don't have an ID [at the airport] there's a different process, more of a search, but you don't need ID. Even in the context of terrorism there are exceptions for people flying without photo ID."