Voter ID Laws
January 31st, 2008
Last weekend, I pulled a little stunt to make a point about voter ID laws. I chose to use the gun rights movement as an example here, because many of their legitimate complaints about various gun control laws (e.g., that they harm the law abiding more than the potential criminals, that they’re ineffective, etc.) apply to voter ID laws. But in the case of voter ID laws, these arguments are even stronger.
The truth of the matter is, voter fraud is vanishingly rare. In two of the most contested elections in recent memory (Washington’s gubernatorial race in 2004 and Ohio’s presidential election), fewer than one vote per 100,000 was found to be fraudulent (0.00009% and 0.00004%, respectively). To put this into perspective, if you rounded up to 0.0001% and applied that rate of voter fraud to Florida’s presidential in 2000, it would have amounted to fewer than 600 total votes — not enough to change the result of that election even if every single fraudulent vote were cast for the same candidate.
Meanwhile, requiring a photo ID to vote could disenfranchise nearly 10% of the eligible population, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. In other words, it would potentially inhibit 1,000,000 times as many legitimate voters as fraudulent voters.
Set aside, for the moment, whether you think an ID requirement seems “reasonable,” and ask yourself whether it’s really worth passing a new law, and making eligible voters jump through hoops they’d otherwise not have to jump through, to solve a problem that all the evidence suggests is statistically insignificant.
(Why, then, is there such a big push for voter ID requirements? The cynical answer is to look at the demographics of the eligible voters who are most likely to lack a state-issued photo ID, and to look at who they typically vote for.)
If you’re worried about the integrity of our elections, the much bigger fish is computerized voting. Even ignoring the potential for fraud and abuse at the machine level, the machines are simply more prone to errors than the individual voter fraud rate.
Read the full report from the Brennan Center here (PDF).
UPDATE: I did the “early voting” thing tonight, and while I was there, I asked the poll worker about voting without a photo ID. He told me that here in Tennessee, no photo ID is required. A voter registration card (which has no photo) is sufficient. If you have neither a photo ID nor a voter registration card, you can fill out an “oath of voter” card, and you may then cast a provisional ballot, which gets counted once the information you provided can be verified and matched against an existing registration. I didn’t ask if it was possible to register to vote on site, and he didn’t say.
UPDATE 2: You can see what the voter ID requirements are in your state the 25 ID-requiring states here.
UPDATE 3: Some have questioned the Brennan Center’s estimate that nearly 10% of eligible voters lack photo ID. I found another study, this one from American University (PDF) that claims that 1.2% of registered voters lack photo ID — roughly 2 million registered voters. It’s not apples-to-apples, since you’re dealing with registered voters on one hand and eligible voters on the other, but even with the more conservative number, a photo ID requirement would prevent 120,000 times as many legitimate voters as fraudulent voters. The AU study reveals another interesting characteristic, and one the cynic in me thinks is the real reason behind the push for photo ID requirements: of those registered voters who lack photo ID, over 87% are Democrats, while fewer than 7% are Republicans. (They’re also overwhelmingly females 45 and older.)
Categories: Legal Issues, Politics | 36 Comments
