Another week of primary elections brings with it more news of the campaign to require improved “voter identification.”   States continue to move, and in litigation defend, their ID legislation (Georgia, Missouri and Arizona) and the House Republican Leadership is not to be outdone.  It has a measure of its own, the Federal Election Integrity Act of 2006, now ready for consideration on Thursday.  Under this bill, voters in federal elections would have to show “a government-issued, current, and valid photo identification for which the individual was required to provide proof of United States citizenship s a condition for the issuance of the identification.”  Sec. 2(a)(2)(1). 

     So the national Republican leadership remains committed to an election “reform” program.  It’s virtue is political simplicity: a simple ID, it is said, which is nothing more than what we require of those arranging to take a flight.  The political messaging here is potent.  And to the extent that, as in certain of the state schemes, this same requirement is mysteriously missing from the absentee voting rules, advocates in the states try quite shamelessly to turn this damning omission from their advantage.  Georgia’s lawyers argued this week that voters seeking to avoid the ID requirement need only vote absentee:  the latter helps to ease the burden of the former.  This is the government, present only to help.  Of course, the burden is meant to fall on in-person voters, for it is this population—the one turning up at the polls, not voting through the mails—that these restrictions are designed to reduce. 

     The pending House GOP proposal avoids this question by imposing its ID requirement on all voters.  Now the message is still simpler.  What could be wrong with that?  And with the focus on “US citizenship,” the arguments here flow smoothly into the wider stream of argument about the measures necessary for enhanced homeland security.   This is taking up the lead position among the talking points.  It adds to the simplicity of the proposed measure the urgency of its enactment: the country’s security, not only a more secure electoral process, is at stake.

     It is not only as a disenfranchising measure, however, that this ID program works its mischief.  This would be bad enough, of course.  But it is also this ID program’s function to overwhelm the urgent, legitimate roster of reforms developed in the wake of the 2000 Presidential elections, when the country began, if falteringly, to take note of its collapsed electoral infrastructure. We have seen since then some progress in the development and implementation of these reforms.  Some: not all that much.  On some of the more critical measures, such as the need for professional election administration to replace the partisan controls now in place, we have only the beginnings, with no certainty of eventual success.   The manufactured crisis of “voter identification” helps to keep attention and funding and political legitimacy from being concentrated where it is most needed.  This is why crises are manufactured in the first place. 

Bob Bauer