Two from Packard
Ed Packard, an always-thoughtful election official with the Alabama Secretary of State's office and the chair of the "League of Extraordinary Voters," has two recent commentaries of interest. Sunday's Birmingham News features this op-ed on the right to vote, and Ed's Election Administration blog has this post on the photo ID controversy. Here's a snippet from the latter:

It seems to me that the two sides ('pro-photo-ID,' 'anti-photo-ID,' if I may use such a simplistic typology) have similar goals -- ensuring that those who are eligible to vote may do so and those who are not eligible are prevented from doing so -- but they are talking past one another due to their respective focus on different aspects of the issue of election integrity....

The movement to require photo identification has not surfaced in a vacuum. Litigation, prosecution and anecdotal reports show that we should pay attention to the issue of voter fraud. We should be willing to make reasonable and justifiable adjustments to our elections process to address documented problems and to ensure that voter fraud does not undermine the integrity of that system.

Similarly, though, photo identification proposals come on the heals of policies that served a strong gatekeeper role, mechanisms that arbitrarily limited the population of people who could participate in self-governance: property ownernship requirements, poll taxes, literacy tests, minimum voting age of 21, unreasonable lengths of time on durational residency requirements, and the ban on women's suffrage....

The two sides of the photo identification debate should build a bridge between them so that whatever policies that are adopted are meaningful, fair and realistic; that they act in furtherance of representative democracy, not to place it in jeopardy by human error or human self-interest.

I certainly agree with Packard that access and integrity are both essential to the proper functioning of the democratic process, and I applaud his effort to find common ground in this contentious debate. What's doubtful, at least to my mind, is that the current push to require photo ID at the polls has anything to do with legitimate concerns about fraud.

It's true that there's evidence of some names on the rolls (like "Mickey Mouse") that don't belong there. But there's little or none that Mickey Mouse actually tried to vote. The most recent debunking of such fraud claims appears in this report by Michael McDonald and the Brennan Center, which tears to shreds recent allegations of illicit votes in New Jersey.

The low incidence of fraud at the polling place makes sense, when you give it a little thought. Appearing at the polling place and pretending to be someone you're not is a high risk/low reward strategy for the individual voter. For one bound and determined to engage in fraud, mail-in absentee voting provides a much more promising avenue. The risk of detection is smaller with mail-in ballots, which also provide the opportunity for vote-buying and selling that doesn't exist with in-person voting. In particular, the secrecy of the voting booth prevents would be vote-buyers from verifying that the voter has in fact voted for the promised candidate. Not so with mail-in ballots. This isn't to say that fraud is common with mail-in ballots either, but the opportunity is there.

It's therefore ironic that two of the states that have recently taken steps to impose stricter ID requirements on voters at the polls -- Georgia and Ohio -- have also liberalized mail-in absentee voting. This makes no sense at all, if the real goal is to promote election integrity, a point that a federal district court in Georgia emphasized in putting a halt to that state's new ID law. While I'm hesitant to accuse anyone of vote suppression, it's hard to see what else could be motivating the push to impose new obstances to voters at the polling place when, with their other hand, legislators are making it easier to vote by mail. At the very least, it provides circumstantial evidence that the real goal of photo ID laws has little to do with fraud ... but quite a lot to do with denying equal access to the vote. - posted by Dan Tokaji @ 11:09 PM