This voter ID notion, to be considered by the House today, has some sales appeal, defended as nothing more and nothing less than a law enforcement measure.  H.R. 4844.  Critics point out, accurately, that here is no evidence of widespread fraud, none of the rigorous kind; we are fed anecdotes.  The political motivations are clearer.  A vote on ID, and any law that may pass, are political statements harmonized well with appeals for controlled "immigration," and they echo, too, the call for vigilance about security, including national security.  And the measure is political in its expected effect, because to the extent that this legislation will inhibit some part of the vote, the sponsors are confident that the constituencies affected for the worse, in low-income, minority and elderly communities, will not be their own.
       
      Does this explain how vote fraud, for those who are crusading against it, heads up the list of their concerns about election administration: ahead of malfunctioning machinery, incompetent administration, dirty tricks, and virtually any other known ingredient in the slop that passes for electoral process in this country?  There is another reason for their passion, and it is what passes, in this context, for a sort of conviction. 

     The voters (and prospective voters) targeted by this measure are the ones thought to be incompetent, neither intellectually nor morally up to the standards properly set for the exercise of the franchise.  They are denied the vote if they do not have the documentation needed, or the time, will, or resources required to obtain it; and beneath all the other arguments and calculations, the assumption is that such people have demonstrated their unworthiness as voters, deserving their own exclusion. 

     Yesterday, the state court striking down the Georgia ID law, rejected the “fail safe” procedure providing for voters who lack an ID to return to the polls, within two days of the election, to show the required identification.  The court found that this procedure disenfranchised “an otherwise qualified voter who does not comply with the additional condition, but, from the standpoint of the legislature, the court will have missed the point.  Any voter unable to meet this condition are believed by ID supporters to have exposed a fundamental incapacity, one fully vindicating the cancellation of their voting rights. 

      This relationship of the allegation of fraud to the assumption of incapacity is written vividly in the history of voting rights in this country.  Nineteenth century fear of the immigrant vote was organized into an objection to their defective qualities as citizens, “’the improvident, the ignorant, the vicious, the stupid, the lazy, the drunken, the dirty,”  Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote (2000) at 123,  but it followed, by this logic, that when they voted, they did so fraudulently:  “charges of corruption and naturalization fraud were repeated endlessly….”  Id.  And, as in this time, “claims of widespread corruption were grounded almost entirely in sweeping, highly emotional allegations backed by anecdotes and little systematic investigation evidence.”  Id. at 159.  Earlier eras had their John Funds.

      The House is taking up this bill, of course, only days after the breakdowns in electoral administration in Montgomery County, Maryland, one of the wealthiest counties, where many well-educated, well-to-do voters—yes, that kind of voter—were up against a different sort of incompetence:  the state’s.  And the House bill is being considered only days more after news reports that the federal government has been unable with the expenditure of millions of dollars, and in a national security mission, to arrange for a functional “ID” program for port workers.  Spencer S. Hsu, "Transit-Worker ID Program Stalled," Washington Post (Sept. 17, 2006) at A3.  And what test of competence, for the voter or for the authorities, will be established by the institution of a nationwide photo ID system for voters?  It is certain that where the inevitable breakdown occurs, the federal and state governments may at most lose face but many more will lose their vote.

      At this stage in the history of voting rights, the voter ID movement serves, perniciously, to reallocate responsibility from the state, as guardian of basic rights, to citizens now required to apply—and by applying successfully, to qualify—for those rights.  That this is what this Congress now proposes to say about “electoral reform:  this is what it offers as an answer to the recent years’ experience, across the country, of electoral maladministration.  The problem, it turns out, and as these ID supporters would have it, is to be found among the voters—a certain kind of voter or prospective voter of questionable merit or capacity who has something to prove if she has any inclination to vote.  

      Of this ID legislation—and of the view of voting rights and citizen “capacity” that it advances—Dan Tokaji has found just the word:  shameful.  

Bob Bauer