There’s No Good Argument For Voting Restrictions

This again?

In last week’s Kansas primaries, officials turned away a 97-year-old woman named Beth Hiller at the polling place. The reason? She didn’t have an ID with her. Thanks to a recent state law, Hiller had to get back on the shuttle and head back to her nursing home without getting to exercise her most basic right.

In theory, conservatives are supposed to oppose laws that don’t solve a problem and have unintended consequences. But voter ID is the clearest example we have of a law that helps nobody and hurts lots of people — yet these laws have been a major priority for Republican legislators across the country. A report from the Brennan Center identifies 22 states, including Kansas, that have implemented new voting restrictions since the Republican wave of 2010.

Take North Carolina, where unified Republican control was followed almost immediately by a sweeping set of changes restricting access to the polls. For no good reason, North Carolina cut out a week worth of early-voting days, ended same-day registration, and put a strict voter ID requirement in place, among other changes. A federal judge upheld North Carolina’s package of voter-restriction laws last week. The judge in the case, Bush appointee Thomas Schroeder, claimed that the harm to voters just wasn’t big enough to overturn the law.

Unfortunately, it’s a lot easier for North Carolina to push through voting changes like this, thanks to the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act last year. Multiple states rushed to clamp down on voting in reaction to the verdict.

A spokesman for North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory called the voting restrictions “common-sense protections that preserve the sanctity of the voting booth.”

I don’t blame average voters for thinking voter ID makes sense. If you’re not up on the details of the issue, the notion has a certain appeal; after all, you want the election to reflect the will of legitimate voters. But even a cursory look at the evidence shows that voter ID blocks plenty of legitimate voters — people like Beth Hiller — without actually solving a problem that exists.

No, the fault is with politicians like Gov. Pat McCrory, who cynically lie to their constituents, claiming that the integrity of elections is in doubt as an excuse for a pure power grab.

In-person voter fraud, the crime that voter ID is supposed to prevent, is practically nonexistent. A study by political scientist Justin Levitt found 31 serious allegations since 2000 — out of literally a billion ballots cast in these elections.

That’s billion with a B. To put that in perspective, voter ID laws are meant to solve a problem that is 10,000 times less likely than being struck by lightning. There isn’t a study that’s been done without similar results.

Voter ID laws are like hosing someone down with a hazardous pesticide in order to protect them from the dangerous bite of the Talking Unicorn Spider. And the thing is, everyone who is in a position to pass voter ID laws knows this.

No serious person can look you in the eye and honestly tell you that the problem of voter fraud is bigger than the number of voters blocked by voter ID.

So what are you left with? What is the good-faith case for voter ID and for cutting back access to the polls?

Maybe the argument is that “voter integrity,” the “sanctity” of the voting booth, is so important that a single instance of in-person voter fraud is worth preventing at any cost. But how much integrity can the process have if some number of Beth Hillers aren’t able to cast a perfectly legitimate vote?

Maybe it’s about “security theater,” as Levitt puts it – the idea that thinking their elections are more secure helps people feel better about them. But not only is this a profoundly stupid argument, it’s not even true; as Levitt points out, “people in states with more restrictive ID laws don’t generally feel better about their elections than people in more permissive states.”

Maybe voter ID rules need to be in place to deter potential in-person voter fraud, someone might argue. But the thing is that in-person voter fraud is already illegal, and as study after study shows, almost never happens. And with good reason: it’d be a dumb way to try to win an election. How does one go about secretly organizing hundreds or thousands of people to affirmatively commit a crime in order to get an unknown number of fraudulent votes? The risk just doesn’t match the cost and the reward. It’d be easier and cheaper to win an election honestly.

Every time, without fail, that I press a pro-voter ID conservative on these objections, I end up hearing something like this: “maybe if they can’t even get an ID they shouldn’t be voting in the first place.”

Ah, here we have the answer! Voter ID isn’t about who has the legitimate right to vote in the eyes of the law. It’s about who deserves to vote in the eyes of the supporters of voter ID. This is an honest argument, at least, if morally loathsome.

Who is most likely to not have an ID? The most disempowered people — younger voters, elderly voters, poor voters, and voters of color.

An even simpler answer is that proposed by Pennsylvania state Rep. Mike Turzai, who claimed that voter ID would allow Mitt Romney to win in that state. Either he is so dumb that he thinks that a silent conspiracy of hundreds of thousands of fraudulent voters takes place in Pennsylvania every election, and voter ID laws can foil it, or else he has a semblance of a brain and knows the truth — that these laws are targeted at preventing the wrong sort of people, people who might vote for Democrats, from exercising the right to participate in government.

Politicians like Pat McCrory know exactly who these voting restrictions hurt. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be proposing them.

When they talk to the press and to voters, the supporters of voter ID are quick to use words like “integrity” and “sanctity.” They’re quick to insist that this is about restoring trust in the electoral process. They talk about integrity and trust even as they’re flat-out, knowingly lying, making an active choice to bar their constituents from the polls.

I wonder what they say to themselves, in the mirror?

I wonder what they’d say to Beth Hiller?

Seth D. Michaels is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C. He’s on Twitter as@sethdmichaels.