Voter ID

Requiring voters to prove they are who they say they are in order to cast a ballot is a simple, common-sense measure that helps ensure honest elections.

Opponents of photo ID falsely charge that such requirements discriminate against poor and minority voters. Each time this claim has been used in the courts, plaintiffs have failed to produce evidence of any individual who was actually denied the right to vote for lack of a photo ID. Despite this fact, and that all demographic groups including African-Americans support voter ID laws, accusations of Jim Crow, the racist system that disenfranchised Southern blacks for generations, continue to be hurled with abandon.

The Supreme Court has stated that because voter ID is free, the inconveniences of going to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, gathering applicable documents, or posing for a photograph are not substantial burdens on most voters’ right to vote. Nor do they represent a significant increase over the usual burdens of voting — registering or driving to a polling place. If people show up without an ID, they can cast a provisional ballot and bring in their ID later.

The Supreme Court found that the interests in requiring voter ID are unquestionably relevant in protecting the integrity and reliability of the electoral process as part of a nationwide effort to improve and modernize election procedures criticized as antiquated and inefficient.

In Crawford v. Marion County Election Board (2008), the Supreme Court also noted the particular interest in preventing voter fraud in response to the problem of voter registration rolls with a large number of names of persons who are either deceased or no longer live in Indiana. While the trial record contained no evidence that “in-person voter impersonation at polling places had actually occurred in Indiana, such fraud had occurred in other parts of the country, and Indiana’s own experience with voter fraud in a 2003 mayoral primary demonstrates a real risk that voter fraud could affect a close election’s outcome.”

The Supreme Court noted that there was no question that the state had a legitimate and important interest in counting only eligible voters’ ballots. Lastly the Court noted that the state interest in protecting public confidence in elections also has independent importance because such voter confidence encourages citizen participation in the democratic process.

Using a photo ID for voting is a central recommendation from the bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform, headed by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker. Here’s what the commission’s official report says:

“A good registration list will ensure that citizens are only registered in one place, but election officials still need to make sure that the person arriving at a polling site is the same one that is named on the registration list. In the old days and in small towns where everyone knows each other, voters did not need to identify themselves. But in the United States, where 40 million people move each year, and in urban areas where some people do not even know the people living in their own apartment building let alone their precinct, some form of identification is needed.”

“The electoral system cannot inspire public confidence if no safeguards exist to deter or detect fraud or to confirm the identity of voters. Photo IDs currently are needed to board a plane, enter federal buildings, and cash a check. Voting is equally important.”

ACRU Commentary

Fixing Elections, Automatically

By Robert Knight If you think that the politicians who now run our government are bad, how about a system with leaders chosen by people too lazy even to register to vote? That's the goal of leftist groups that are pushing "automatic registration" while opposing common-sense election safeguards like photo voter ID laws and citizenship requirements. The process got going in 1993, when Bill Clinton signed his first piece of legislation, the National Voter Registration Act, better known as Motor Voter. That law mandates ease of registry to vote at state departments of motor vehicles and other government agencies, such as welfare offices. But people still have to bother to sign up. Automatic registration, otherwise known as "universal registration" was adopted in March in Oregon, where Democratic Gov. Kate Brown and the Democratic-led legislature approved the nation's first "opt-out" registration system. On the heels of that victory, progressives in 17 states and the District of Columbia, plus both houses of Congress, introduced similar bills. In June, Hillary Clinton floated the idea of automatically registering all 18-year-olds. California's Democratically-controlled Senate enacted the California New Motor Voter Program on Sept. 10, followed by the House on Sept. 11. Gov. Jerry Brown was expected to sign it. Under the new law, all adult citizens who get a driver's license, renew a license, obtain a state identification card, or file a change of address form with the Department of Motor Vehicles will be automatically registered to vote. As with Oregon's law, people can opt out. For now. Euthanasia-loving Oregon, which is keeping one step ahead of California as a fount for progressive activism on the Left Coast, had already adopted via referendum an all-mail-in ballot system in 1998. Mandating automatic registration is just the latest wrinkle. The next inevitable "reform" - mandatory voting - was mentioned by President Obama last March during a town hall in Cleveland, where he said, "Other countries have mandatory voting. It would be transformative if everybody voted - that would counteract money more than anything." So, people who can't be bothered to register or to vote and don't have even a minimal grasp of American constitutional government would be forced to vote. Qui bono? Obviously, the party that sustains the Free Stuff Army, whose growth to a tipping point could end the American experiment in liberty and self-government. This would certainly qualify as "transformative." The national campaign for automatic registration is led by a group called FairVote, which is funded by left-leaning organizations that include the Ford Foundation, the Herb Block Foundation, the Ms. Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund and George Soros' Open Society Institute. Based in the hippie town of Takoma Park, Maryland, where FairVote led a successful fight to change the law in 2013 to allow 16-year-olds to vote in municipal elections, FairVote is also pushing to destroy the constitutionally required Electoral College and replace it with a National Popular Vote in presidential elections. This would make smaller states meaningless in presidential campaigns (talk about "flyover country") and create a huge incentive for even more vote fraud in major cities like Philadelphia and Chicago, where stuffing ballot boxes is second nature. In addition to advocating a national voting age of 16, FairVote wants "a comprehensive 'voting curriculum.'" Imagine for a moment what will be served up to high school students, who are already immersed in a progressive stew of moral relativism, climate change hysteria, revisionist history, sexual "liberation" and increasingly stringent political correctness. It's not for nothing that SAT critical reading scores have hit their lowest average in 40 years, and the lowest math scores in 16 years. Teachers are too busy brainwashing kids into the New Political Order to bother much with math and English. No wonder the left wants 16-year-olds to vote before they fully develop their cautionary adult natures. For good measure, FairVote also supports the misnamed Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2015, which would undo the Supreme Court's historic Shelby v. Holder decision in 2013 that struck down an outdated portion of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). FairVote employs an outrageous lie, saying that the effect of the Shelby ruling is "stripping the Justice Department of the powers it had for five decades to curb racial discrimination in voting." Nonsense. All the Shelby ruling did was to end the anachronistic system by which Southern states and several other jurisdictions were under special scrutiny of the Justice Department and a D.C.-based federal court panel. The high court noted that Jim Crow was long dead and that the VRA categories were based on now-irrelevant 50-year-old data. Meanwhile, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is still "a permanent, nationwide ban on racial discrimination in voting. It bans intentional discrimination as well as discriminatory 'results' based on a court's review of the 'totality of the circumstances' under which it occurred," according to the Heritage Foundation.

How an Alabama Woman Used Voter Fraud to Get Her Boyfriend Elected

In Dothan, Ala., the verdict is in: it was election fraud. Last week, a jury convicted 66-year-old Olivia Reynolds on 24 felony counts of absentee ballot fraud in the contested 2013 election for the Dothan City Commission. Reynolds worked on the re-election campaign for District 2 incumbent Amos Newsome. During the tainted 2013 election, she forged and altered enough absentee ballots to guarantee victory for her boss and boyfriend. The verdict will only come as a shock to those who still insist that voter fraud simply doesn't exist in the U.S. In 2013, Newsome narrowly won reelection to his office, besting challenger Lamesa Danzey by a scant 14 votes. However, after Danzey identified at least 37 absentee ballots that she claimed were illegally cast, the Houston County Sheriff began investigating irregularities in the District 2 race. Danzey, it turned out, had won the in-person vote by a hundred votes, 343-243. But Newsome had carried a whopping 96% of the absentee vote, winning 119 of the 124 ballots cast by mail. That was enough to tip the scales in the incumbent's favor - and to raise the eyebrows of investigators given how much the margin of absentee ballots cast for Newsome differed from the margin of votes cast for him on Election Day. Interestingly, this was not the first time Newsome had lost the in-person vote but carried the absentee vote by wide margins. In 2011, he lost at the polls by 45 votes, yet won 131 absentee ballots - all but 9 cast that year. The Sheriff's investigation culminated in the arrest of Reynolds and three others. Three of the four have now been convicted in what appears to have been an organized conspiracy to deny the citizens of Dothan their right to free and fair elections. Investigators found that the defendants had fraudulently applied for and submitted absentee ballots for registered voters. During Reynolds' trial, it was revealed that she went even further. Witnesses testified that she ordered them to vote for Newsome. Four witnesses confirmed they had done so even though they intended to vote against him. In some cases, Reynolds illegally filled out part or all of voters' ballots for them. In the course of the trial, some voters discovered their ballots had evidently been cast for Newsome, even though they had never voted for him. Alabama law requires that absentee votes must be observed by two witnesses, to safeguard against fraud. But the case reveals how easy it is to circumvent that requirement - and just how insecure absentee ballots are. In fact, absentee ballot fraud is one of the most common forms of election fraud. Reynolds' attorney, Chris Capps, responded to the charges against his client with allegations of racism on the part of prosecutors and law enforcement. The city of Dothan, Capps said, was just out to get Newsome and undermine the ability of a minority district to vote absentee. Of course, Capps wanted jurors to overlook the fact that the primary victims of Reynolds' fraud were the minority residents of District 2 whom she effectively disenfranchised. Such false claims are sadly common in the debate over election fraud. Opponents characterize efforts to ensure the integrity of the electoral process, such as requiring photo ID for both in-person and absentee voting, as little more than an attempt to suppress minority votes. In reality, nothing of the kind is true. Often these claims, such as in this case, are merely an attempt to distract the public from the criminal activity of the defendants and to deter and scare prosecutors from proceeding. Analysis has revealed that minority turnout has actually increased in states with photo ID requirements. At trial, Assistant District Attorney Banks Smith reminded jurors and the public that voter fraud cases are not about political agendas or racially-motivated attacks. "This case is about the sanctity of the ballot." And jurors, it seems, paid attention. The evidence was so overwhelming it took less than an hour for the jury to return a guilty verdict. Reynolds is the third person convicted of absentee ballot fraud in connection with the Newsome campaign. Though Commissioner Newsome himself has not been directly fingered for criminal conduct, the legitimacy of his election has clearly been called into question.

One Person, One Vote: Advancing Electoral Equality, not Equality of Representation

By Hans von Spakovsky and Elizabeth Slattery The Supreme Court has held that the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause includes a "one-person, one-vote" guarantee requiring voting districts to be drawn "on a basis that will insure...that equal numbers of voters can vote for proportionally equal numbers of officials." So far, states have been free to choose which population category to use, such as total population, voting-age population, citizen voting-age population, citizen-eligible voting-age population, or some variant thereof, as long as the Constitution does not forbid it. Now, in what may be the most important voting case in 50 years, Evenwel v. Abbott, the Supreme Court is presented in its October 2015 term with the chance to clarify whether the "one person, one vote" principle includes a judicially enforceable right to ensure that voters are not denied an equal vote.

A Court Smacks Down Obama’s Justice Department

By J. Christian Adams & Hans A. von Spakovsky -- August 31, 2015 The recently concluded federal trial over North Carolina's election rules proved one thing beyond a reasonable doubt: The Obama administration and its partisan, big-money, racial-interest-group allies will stop at nothing to win elections. And using the courts to change election rules is a key part of their strategy. That was clearly evident in the federal courtroom in Winston-Salem. The plaintiffs, including the Justice Department, challenged a number of election reforms implemented in 2013 that were designed to reduce the cost and complexity of running elections and make it harder to commit voter fraud. The administration pushed a novel legal argument. In its telling, if a change in election rules might statistically affect blacks more than whites, it constitutes illegal discrimination. For example, if 98 percent of whites have a voter ID but only 97.5 percent of blacks have one, then requiring voters to present ID violates federal law. Never mind the fact that getting an ID is free, easy, and open to everyone without regard to race. And never mind if a policy change is in line with the rules of many other states, or if it's explicitly sanctioned by federal law. The mere act of changing the law in the wrong direction is discriminatory. In other words, the Obama administration would turn the Voting Rights Act into a one-way ratchet to help Democrats. The court refused to go along. None of the reforms had an obvious racial angle. For example, North Carolina required voters to vote in the precinct where they actually live. This commonsense reform -- returning to the law the state had prior to 2003 -- prevents chaos on Election Day, from overcrowded polling places to precincts' running out of ballots because election officials can't predict how many voters will show up. Thirty-one states do not allow voting outside of your precinct. The Justice Department claims that North Carolina broke the law when it returned to this policy.

Another ACLU Attack on Election Reforms

By Robert Knight Although people in the nation's smallest state can obtain photo voter IDs with ease, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) says that requiring an ID in order to vote is a hardship. The group's Rhode Island chapter has demanded an end to the photo voter ID law that a solidly Democratic legislature enacted in 2011. It's the latest attack by the ACLU and other leftist groups against state election reforms that are specifically designed to prevent vote fraud. Over the past few years, courts have struck down laws in Arkansas, Missouri, Pennsylvania and Texas, while upholding them in Georgia, Tennessee, Ohio and Wisconsin. In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Indiana's photo voter ID law, which has been a model for other states. North Carolina's voter ID law, which also curbs early voting and ends out of precinct voting and same-day registration, went to trial in late July in a federal court.

Does Rhode Island Have an Identity Crisis?

By Susan A. Carleson Although Rhode Island residents can easily get a photo voter ID, requiring one at a polling place suppresses "minority, low-income, disabled, and elderly voters," according to the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). So, of course, the ACLU has demanded an end to the state's photo voter ID law enacted by a Democratic legislature in 2011. Anyone living in Rhode Island who wants to get a free voter ID can get one. All you have to do is provide an employee ID card; an ID card provided by a commercial establishment; a credit or debit card; a military ID card; a student ID card; a health club ID card; an insurance plan ID card; or a public housing ID card. Don't have one of those forms of identification? No problem!