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

Here Comes the 2014 Voter Fraud

In the past few months, a former police chief in Pennsylvania pleaded guilty to voter fraud in a town-council election. That fraud had flipped the outcome of a primary election. Former Connecticut legislator Christina Ayala has been indicted on 19 charges of voter fraud, including voting in districts where she didn't reside. (She hasn't entered a plea.) A Mississippi grand jury indicted seven individuals for voter fraud in the 2013 Hattiesburg mayoral contest, which featured voting by ineligible felons and impersonation fraud. A woman in Polk County, Tenn., was indicted on a charge of vote-buying--a practice that the local district attorney said had too long "been accepted as part of life" there. Now come the midterm elections on Nov. 4. What is the likelihood that your vote won't count? That your vote will, in effect, be canceled or stolen as a consequence of mistakes by election officials or fraudulent votes cast by campaign workers or ineligible voters like felons and noncitizens?

Could Non-Citizens Decide the November Election?

Could control of the Senate in 2014 be decided by illegal votes cast by non-citizens? Some argue that incidents of voting by non-citizens are so rare as to be inconsequential, with efforts to block fraud a screen for an agenda to prevent poor and minority voters from exercising the franchise, while others define such incidents as a threat to democracy itself. Both sides depend more heavily on anecdotes than data. In a forthcoming article in the journal Electoral Studies, we bring real data from big social science survey datasets to bear on the question of whether, to what extent, and for whom non-citizens vote in U.S. elections. Most non-citizens do not register, let alone vote. But enough do that their participation can change the outcome of close races. Our data comes from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). Its large number of observations (32,800 in 2008 and 55,400 in 2010) provide sufficient samples of the non-immigrant sub-population, with 339 non-citizen respondents in 2008 and 489 in 2010. For the 2008 CCES, we also attempted to match respondents to voter files so that we could verify whether they actually voted. How many non-citizens participate in U.S. elections? More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens voted. Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010.

‘Ghetto Aurora’ Is Ground Zero for Colorado Vote Fraud

A Greenpeace activist supporting Senator Mark Udall has been caught on undercover video by James O'Keefe saying a great town to commit voter fraud is Ghetto Aurora. I couldn't find Ghetto Aurora on a map, but the activist says it is in Colorado. It's no surprise that the best place to commit voter fraud is Colorado. If you deliberately tried to design an election system to aid fraud, here's how you'd do it. You'd put ballots in the hand of folks that you have some indication no longer live where they did long ago. You'd make sure folks got ballots even if many of the counties had more people on the voter rolls than people alive. Then, you'd make sure that voting is decentralized, out of sight of election officials so that there is no way to know who is really voting the ballots. Check, check and check. Welcome to Colorado's new vote by mail system.

Video Sting Shows How Easy Voter Fraud Is in Colorado

Many liberals are adamant there is no threat of voter fraud that justifies efforts to improve the integrity of elections. "There is no real concrete evidence of voter fraud," tweeted Donna Brazile, former acting chair of the Democratic National Committee, this week. "It's a big a-- lie." James O'Keefe, the guerilla filmmaker who brought down the ACORN voter-registration fraudsters in 2010 and forced the resignation of NPR executives, politely disagrees. Today, he is releasing some new undercover footage that raises disturbing questions about ballot integrity in Colorado, the site of fiercely contested races for the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House, and the governorship. When he raised the issue of filling out some of the unused ballots that are mailed to every household in the state this month, he was told by Meredith Hicks, the director of Work for Progress, a liberal group funded by Democratic Super PACS.: "That is not even like lying or something, if someone throws out a ballot, like if you want to fill it out you should do it."

ACLU ‘Thrilled’ to Kill Voter ID in Arkansas

Reacting to the Arkansas Supreme Court's ruling declaring the state's voter-identification law unconstitutional, ACLU of Arkansas Legal Director Holly Dickson said her group is "thrilled." Well, why not. They've been at it all over the country, trying to take down voter ID laws and enrich the ground that can yield a bumper crop of vote fraud. The unanimous decision on Oct. 15 upheld a lower court ruling and will affect early balloting, which began Monday, Oct. 20. Election Day is Tuesday, Nov 4. The Republican-controlled state legislature enacted the fraud-prevention law in 2013 over a veto by Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe. The justices ruled that the law requiring all voters to present government-issued photo identification, "imposes a requirement that falls outside" four qualifications outlined in the state constitution: A voter must be a U.S. citizen, an Arkansas resident, 18 years old and registered to vote. Providing proof that voters are, indeed, who they say they are, a requirement that the and more than 70 percent of the public strongly supports, is too high a hurdle, according to the ACLU. Ms. Dickson called the law "an unconstitutional barrier that has already stolen legitimate voting rights." When clerks ask to see an ID before selling beer, are they "stealing legitimate drinking rights?"

Democrats Losing War against Voter ID

In one month, voters will go to the polls to elect the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate. Will the midterms be clean? Could some elections be stolen? Everyone ostensibly agrees that voters have a right to know that their decision is not being ignored. And a clear majority supports a simple way to make sure: voter ID. You would not know it if you read only the New York Times or watched only MSNBC, but the Left and President Obama are losing their fight to block the widespread introduction of voter ID cards. In courts of law and the court of public opinion, the issue is gaining traction. With few exceptions, liberal pressure groups have lost lawsuits in state after state, with courts tossing out their faux claims that ID laws are discriminatory, unconstitutional or suppress minority voting. Polls show that a large majorities including Republicans, Democrats, whites, blacks and Hispanics support voter ID as a common-sense reform. The myth that voter ID is a new Jim Crow-type effort to reduce minority voting is widely rejected for the rubbish that it is -- except by academia and the glitterati of the mainstream media. One Rasmussen poll found that 72 percent of the public believes all voters should prove their identities before being allowed to cast ballots, and also that when it comes to voter ID, "opinions have not changed much over the years."