Photo ID

Some Republican politicians are trying to keep regular Americans from voting against them -- by changing our laws to keep them from voting at all.

You're not going to believe this, but I have it good authority that Republican Photo ID bills have absolutely nothing to do with their stated purpose (i.e. fraud), and are entirely about skewing elections in favor of Republicans by creating hurdles for otherwise eligible voters to cast ballots. 

The Joplin Globe, however, takes SOS candidate Shane Schoeller at his word when he says he's super duper concerned with fraud he can't find, but reaches the same conclusion: Schoeller's photo ID bill is bad news, and disenfranchises Missourians.  From a new editorial: 

[Schoeller's proposal] would go a long way to further disenfranchise voters.

Voter ID has been a contentious subject in Missouri. The state Supreme Court struck down a photo ID law in 2006, ruling that it infringed on the fundamental right to vote granted by the Missouri Constitution...

If Missouri legislators can show us instances of voter fraud in our own state, then we would gladly review our position. Until then, we don’t think photo ID should be implemented.

Columbia Missourian Columnist George Kennedy’s assessment of the Voter Photo ID constitutional amendment.

To review, then: We’ll be voting on a set of changes that purport to address a nonexistent problem while leaving real weaknesses untouched. We’ll make it harder to vote for people who already are less likely to do so. All that at a cost of millions we don’t have.

Looks like a slam dunk to me.

On behalf of the Congressional Black Caucus, Congressman Emanuel Cleaver testified before the Senate Committee on Judiciary’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights during their hearings about new Photo ID requirements implemented in many states around the country.

He focused on how these requirements are truly a solution in search of a problem:

Requiring voters to provide a specific, narrowly defined, piece of photo identification is unnecessary. The safeguards currently in place to verify voters’ identity works. That much is clear because there has been no evidence of substantial voter impersonation fraud, the only type of fraud requiring voters to provide a specific type of government issued photo ID guards against.

Read the full testimony below:

CBC-Cleaver Voter Suppression Testimony-FTR (1)

Democrats in the United States House of Representatives sent a letter to the United States Department of Justice requesting that they look into new laws that require voters to possess photo identification in order to cast a ballot. Missouri Governor Jay Nixon vetoed voter photo ID legislation earlier this summer because it would put the voting rights of hundreds of thousands of Missourians at risk. 

Here is an excerpt from the House Democrats' letter:

Approximately 11 percent of voting-age citizens in the country -- or more than 20 million individuals -- lack government-issued photo identification. We urge you to protect the voting rights of Americans by using the full power of the Department of Justice to review these voter identification bills and scrutinize their implementation.

The Voting Rights Act vests significant authority in the Department to ensure laws are not implemented in a discriminatory manner... [T]he Department should exercise vigilance in overseeing whether these laws are implemented in a way that discriminates against protected clauses in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

.Missouri Democratic Representatives Russ Carnahan, Lacy Clay and Emanuel Cleaver all signed the letter.  

h/t Salon

Earlier today, the Advancement Project, Fair Elections Legal Network (FELN), American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri and ACLU of Kansas and Western Missouri announced a legal challenge to SJR2, saying that "the ballot language misleads voters and if passed will restrict the voting rights of Missourians, including the elderly, people with disabilities, and students, among others." 

The Associated Press and KWMU already have stories on the suit, and you can read the full complaint and associated press release here. 

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It seems that Senate President Pro Tem Rob Mayer is so worried about Tom Schweich’s cost estimate for the Photo ID Constitutional amendment, that he considered filing a lawsuit. When one Republican is thinking about suing another, you know things are not good for them:

State Auditor Tom Schweich's surprisingly hefty estimate of the annual government cost of Missouri's proposed photo ID requirement for voters has some Republican legislative leaders now fearing that the proposal could be a tougher sell when it hits ballots in 2012.

A spokeswoman for state Senate President Pro Tem Rob Mayer, R-Dexter, said he even briefly considered filing suit by today's 5 p.m. deadline in a last-ditch attempt to get the estimate changed.

Mayer (right) has dropped the idea of filing suit himself. But his spokeswoman notes that any Missouri resident can go to court to challenge the cost estimate -- which ranges from $3 million to $6.5 million a year.

Gov. Jay Nixon today stood up to the national GOP effort to skew elections by creating unnecessary hurdles to voting:

This new mandate would disproportionately impact senior citizens and persons with disabilitiees, among others, who are qualified to vote and have been lawfully voting since becoming eligible to do so...Disenfranchising certain classes of persons is not acceptable.

USA Today put out a pretty persuasive Op-Ed opposing attempts to disenfranchise voters with restrictive ID laws by Republican-controlled state legislatures around the country. Here is an excerpt:

Scratch just gently beneath the surface, and these new measures appear unnecessary at best. Voter fraud is rare and consists largely of the types of actions that IDs would not correct, such as vote-buying and voter intimidation. Fraud is already kept in check by elections officials, poll watchers from both parties, and acceptance of alternatives to photo IDs, such as utility bills.

One study in Minnesota, done after an extraordinarily close Senate race in 2008, found a grand total of seven suspicious votes, out of nearly 3 million cast. No charges were filed that year. Those seven cases were exceeded by the dozen or so elderly nuns in nearby Indiana who were turned away from the polls for lack of picture IDs.

Yesterday, the Post-Dispatch reported that Sen. Bill Stouffer isn't all that concerned with violations of voting laws when they're committed by known Republicans, even though he's spent much of the past year manufacturing fears about voter impersonation fraud to justify his party's plan to limit voting for people who just might vote for Democratic candidates.

Today, an editorial in the Post-Dispatch calling on Gov. Jay Nixon to veto legislation that would put the GOP voter suppression plan into place includes the following:

We're quite confident Mr. [Todd] Akin is who he says he is. And we're fairly confident that, given time, he could obtain a valid drivers license with a current address on it.

But, given the new voter ID requirements Missouri lawmakers seek as law, wouldn't Mr. Akin's votes of the past several years, by definition, be fraudulent if he knowingly voted in the wrong jurisdiction?

"That is true," Mr. Stouffer told us.

The latest editorial from The Star: "A bill requiring citizens to produce government-issued photo identification at the polls would create barriers for thousands of elderly and disabled Missourians, college students and minorities. Now is the time to stop it. A supposed sweetener in the bill — the introduction of convenient advance voting in Missouri — is a red herring. Early voting would be subject to annual funding by the legislature and governor. The chances of finding money in a cash-strapped budget anytime soon are slim. The odds of the GOP-dominated legislature scraping up funds to initiate the photo ID requirement are much better, given the current pressure to do so from national Republican-leaning interest groups..."

And from the Warrensburg Daily Star-Journal: "Voters should be amazed at the contradictory actions of Missouri lawmakers...Given the deep budget cuts made by lawmakers, and how the voter ID bill would accomplish nothing, the $7 million cost is simply a huge waste..." 

Please note: A scanned copy of the print version of the Daily Star-Journal editorial may be found here.

Here's a sampling of recent editorials on Republican efforts to skew elections by creating new hurdles to voting, a fundamental right in Missouri.  Newspapers from across the state have condemned similar efforts for years. 

Columbia Daily Tribune, 5/7: "Republicans in the General Assembly are in the process of passing wrongheaded legislation adding another burden to Missouri voters. When it arrives on his desk, Gov. Jay Nixon should veto it..."

Joplin Globe, 5/6: "In 2006, Missouri courts recognized that requiring voters to provide photo identification before they can vote violates the state’s constitution. The court’s message clear: A law like this would create barriers at the polls for some senior citizens, college students, poor people and some people with disabilities. Why? Because they make up the nearly 230,000 voters in our state who do not possess driver’s licenses, one of the easiest and most-often used forms of photo identification. The measure is back, and in our view it does more to disenfranchise voters than it does to protect them..."

Yes.

It's beyond unfortunate that as one of their top priorities, the Republicans who control the Missouri Legislature set out this year to make it harder, not easier, for Missourians to vote.

The effort, referred to as voter ID, is part of a national GOP plan to raise barriers to large swaths of voters who generally lean Democratic in their political philosophy.

It seems reasonable enough to ask voters to produce a drivers license before they exercise their constitutional right. Most of us carry drivers licenses all of the time. We produce them to cash checks, buy airline tickets and conduct regular business. So what's the big deal?

Well, the big deal is that not everybody who has the right to vote has a drivers license. And the right to vote — particularly in the Missouri Constitution — is a very big deal indeed...

In short, it's a solution — and a bad one at that — in search of a problem.

Good news: The Democrats in the House of Representatives and two Republicans -- Mike McGhee (Odessa) and Ray Weter (Nixa) -- voted against the GOP effort to amend Missouri's constitution to create new and unnecessary hurdles for voting (SJR2). 

Bad news: Republicans continued to mislead the press and reporters about the intent and effects of their proposal, which is what they've done for years on this issue. Stanley Cox continued to his hackery, even saying that ACORN is "still cheating" in Missouri elections (!).   A few minutes later, Paul Curtman said ACORN and fraud in a sentence about four individuals who submitted bogus voter registrations in 2006, and Missourinet's Brent Martin included Curtman's comments in a story without mentioning that the proposed constitutional amendment would do nothing to change the laws under which those people were indicted.

The Star breaks down the Republican efforts to create unnecessary hurdles for voting in Missouri, drafted for the purposes of skewing elections in their favor:

Missouri is working hard to join Kansas and the other states that seek to undercut voting rights by requiring photo identifications at the polls.

A final vote in the House and a Senate vote to clean up a minor detail are all that is needed to put the issue on the ballot. Having had a similar law declared unconstitutional, lawmakers want voters to enshrine their wrong thinking by passing a constitutional amendment.

The arguments are well established. Proponents say official photo IDs are needed to prevent voter fraud. But verifiable instances of voter fraud are rare.

Meanwhile, the restrictions would make voting much harder for hundreds of elderly and disabled Missourians, not to mention students and legal immigrants.

Among other problems, the bill under consideration confers undue authority on election judges to determine whether the signature on an ID card matches a would-be voter’s signature at the polls.

Rep. Pat Conway (D-St. Joseph) today voted for the Republican plan to skew state and federal elections with unnecessary government-issued photo ID requirements. The bill passed this morning by the House Elections Committee differs from the legislation passed by the Senate earlier this session and from the proposal already approved by the full House.

The Senate Financial and Governmental Organizations and Elections committee voted "do pass" on three voter suppression bills this afternoon without amending them, though a combined bill -- perhaps with early voting or no-fault absentee voting provisions -- is expected to be worked out before legislation is debated by the full Senate. 

Sens. Kevin Engler (R-Farmington) and Bill Stouffer (R-Napton) both have proposals (SJR 9 and SJR 2) to amend the state constitution to allow for unnecessary and expensive laws that would require government-issued photo IDs when voting.  (Stouffer's language says voters "may" be required to show such identification; Engler's says they "shall.") Stouffer has a third bill (SB 3) that would put the new requirements into law, provided that the constitution is amended to allow the GOP-friendly suppression they desire. 

The Missouri Senate's Financial & Governmental Organizations and Elections Committee announced yesterday that they'll be hearing three bills on Monday designed to skew the state's voter rolls in favor of Republicans. Committee Chairman Kevin Engler (R-Farmington) and Sen. Bill Stouffer (R-Napton) are each proposing their own a constitutional amendments (SJR 9 and SJR 2) to create the framework for new government-issued photo ID requirements, and Stouffer has also sponsored a resolution to actually enact those requirements (SB 3) if one of the constitutional changes are approved.

As Rep. Chris Kelly (D-Columbia) said last year when debating similar voter suppression efforts, this is a "solution looking for a problem." The stated goal of GOP proponents is to protect democracy against unspecified voter impersonation fraud, but it's really about creating new and unnecessary hurdles to voting for populations who just happen to tend to support Democratic candidates. 

Last year, for example, House sponsor Stanley Cox (R-Sedalia) claimed that there are "countless examples of voter fraud" in Missouri.  And when pressed to provide examples, he couldn't quite count any.  So, GOPers changed their tune and decided that it's actually "impossible" to know if any fraud is going on, so we should go ahead on disenfranchises thousands and thousands of voters just in case.  

Editorial boards around the state have condemned these cynical efforts by Republicans in previous years, and are expected to do so again this year.    Here's a sampling, from the Sedalia Democrat in April 2010:

VOTER PHOTO ID BILL MISGUIDED, UNNEEDED

Rep. Stanley Cox has convinced enough Missouri House members to support his misguided voter photo identification mandate. We must hope he is less successful if this measure goes before the state’s voters....

Missouri’s Department of Motor Vehicles estimates the number of eligible voters who do not have state-issued ID at about 200,000. The enacting legislation would require taxpayer money be used to provide IDs for Missouri residents who cannot afford them. When you add in mandatory notification costs (public service announcements), cost to create the IDs and system upgrades, among other expenses, this proposal is estimated to hit the state for about $7 million a year the first three years it would be in force, according to the fiscal breakdown of the bill provided by the House Committee on Legislative Research Oversight Division. This at a time when we cannot provide adequate funding for our schools — which is an actual, documented problem in our state.

With two party-line votes this morning, the House Elections Committee approved Rep. John Diehl's (R-Town and Country) HB1966 to require voters to present government-issued photo identification before voting, and Rep. Stanley Cox' (R-Sedalia) HJR64, a proposed constitutional amendment that would create the framework for Diehl's bill. Both pieces of legislation also include provisions for early voting to distract attention from the true intent of their efforts.

One week ago today, Rep. Stanley Cox (R-Sedalia) told the House Elections Committee that "there are countless examples of voter fraud" in Missouri.  Cox has long been a proponent of laws to require voters to show government-issued photo identification at the polls, and is sponsoring a constitutional amendment this year (HJR64) to make that happen.

Then Saturday, longtime voter suppression activist Thor Hearne rejected questions from a conservative crowd in Chesterfield about the possibility of widespread voter fraud.  "I'm not a big believer in conspiracy theories," he said about the conservative hysteria about fraud he helped gin up. (And yes, Hearne's about-face on this subject is still puzzling).

So today, Rep. Cynthia Davis (R-O'Fallon) tried out a brand new message at this week's Elections Committee hearing. In her words, it's now "virtually impossible" to know if there's voter impersonation fraud in Missouri (the kind of fraud a photo id would attempt to thwart). 

You bring up that people haven't proven how much fraud there is, but absent this law, it would be virtually impossible -- after this law is passed is when we may find out how much fraud there was. I would recommend that we need to try it as an experiment, and then we'll [inaudible] be able to discover how many people  showed up.