Recent Voter Id Editorials

Cheap shot
Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle
Jan. 17, 2009

Just when it appeared that the Texas Legislature was putting partisan politics behind it with a consensus speaker in the House to replace the autocratic Tom Craddick, GOP state senators spoiled the session kickoff last week with a bare-knuckled power play.

Determined to clear the way for a controversial measure to require voters to present photo ID at polling places, Republican senators led by Tommy Williams of The Woodlands and Dan Patrick of Houston pushed through a rules change to suspend the normal two-thirds margin needed to bring legislation to the Senate floor.

The only issue to which the change would apply is voter ID.

Last year voter ID legislation passed the House, but died in the Senate. Sen. John Whitmire, a Houston Democrat and the body’s longest serving member, says the two-thirds rule creates a uniquely deliberative process and balances rural and urban interests.

The GOP touts voter ID as a preventative for Election Day voter fraud; Democrats counter that impersonation of registered voters at the polls is rare and has not been documented in significant numbers. Several studies have shown that such laws discourage turnout among the elderly, the poor, Hispanics and blacks, groups who tend to vote Democratic and have less access to picture identification.

After the majority vote to suspend the two-thirds rule for voter ID, Democrats followed with proposals to do the same for a range of issues, including health care and insurance reform. All were defeated on party line votes.

The one Republican to vote with the Democrats against suspending the two-thirds rule, John Carona of San Antonio, criticized his colleagues’ action, saying that it sends the wrong message to voters who demand bipartisan government.

The maneuver may not even secure the passage of voter ID that its sponsors are trying to achieve. While it will be easier to win approval in the Senate, the GOP’s shaky 76-74 majority in the House is far less certain to pass a bill. Under new Speaker Joe Straus, R-San Antonio, it may not even get out of committee.

In a shortsighted gambit, Senate Republicans have displayed unseemly partisanship, shattered a legislative tradition and potentially antagonized the growing Hispanic voter bloc in the state. That’s neither good governance nor smart politics.

---------------------------

Exception to Senate rule was a bad GOP maneuver 
 Express-News
January 16, 2009

Republicans still control the Texas Senate, but demographic trends could change that in coming elections.

In part, that’s why this week’s move to circumvent the traditional two-thirds rule for legislation requiring voters to have a government photo identification was such a bad move.

If one party feels comfortable bending the rule designed to produce consensus policies while it has a majority, the other party will when it gets the upper hand.

Voter ID legislation has spawned a nasty partisan battle in the Senate.

But that one piece of legislation is not worth throwing out the wise tradition that requires two-thirds support to bring a bill to the Senate floor.

Republicans rewrote the rules last week at the legislative session’s beginning to make an exception in the two-thirds rule to allow voter ID legislation on the floor with a simple majority.

The two-thirds rule protects the minority faction the Senate and has long ensured that it takes more than the partisan whim of the moment to move legislation through the Legislature’s upper body.

The rule has been bent before, but it is bad policy.

Dallas Republican Sen. John Carona, who broke away from his GOP colleagues on the issue, told the Hearst Austin bureau that the move “sent a terrible message.”

Carona was correct in assessing that the move would damage relations between the two parties.

The saddest part is that the action will give Democrats ammunition when they have the majority and want to break the tradition for some pet bill sometime down the road and so on.

Senate rules were designed to suppress partisanship and Texas has been well served by that bipartisan approach.

------------------

EDITORIAL: Say it won't be so, Joe! Keep crass partisanship out of the Texas House
Waco Tribune Herald
Saturday, January 17, 2009

Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, still acquainting himself with his new and daunting responsibilities, is about to get his first leadership test in politics, partisanship and personal integrity.

It’s being served to him courtesy of the Texas Senate which, under Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, appears to be bouncing down the dusty road of divisive and dirty politics.

It’s not a road we imagined Dewhurst would be traveling at this juncture. Nor does it speak well of his political future in the eyes of some Texans, including minorities.

While the House under Straus this week appeared to be entering a bright era of bipartisanship, the Senate huddled behind closed doors as Dewhurst and Republicans rigged a change in chamber rules to overcome what they failed to do at the ballot box.

Result: A rule mandating that two-thirds of the Senate agree on whether to bring a bill up for a vote was temporarily junked, specifically to engineer future passage of legislation requiring voter IDs, viewed by some as nothing short of discriminatory.

Right. If you can’t get votes to swing things your way, just change the rules of the game.
Democrats vow Republicans may regret such tricks if Democrats win control of the Senate. After all, this frees up Democrats to change whatever rules they want, whenever — and Republicans can no longer claim high ground about it.

What’s more, the voter ID bill — killed in the Senate two years ago by lawmakers using established rules — is, at best, a needless diversion when lawmakers must stay focused on issues like our children’s education, the roads we drive and how state government can make do with less.

If House Speaker Straus wants to keep things fair, he should demand testimony from Attorney General Greg Abbott who, after a $1.4 million investigation, found only 26 minor cases of voter fraud, mostly involving mailed-in ballots — where a voter ID wouldn’t have helped anyway.
The real reason some Republicans want a voter ID: If mandated, it might well discourage poor, aged and minority voters — a conclusion drawn partially by the non-partisan League of Women Voters.

That kind of exclusionary politics has no place in either chamber. It’s up to Joe Straus to display political courage or risk becoming just another party stooge.

---------------------------------

EDITORIAL, Austin American Statesman, 1-15-09

Senate Republicans put the GOP first, not issues that matter

Republicans in the Texas Senate rammed through a rule change to win passage of a voter ID bill, a strictly partisan issue at a time when the state faces far more serious issues.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Forget the $9.1 billion drop in projected state revenues and the state's slowing economy.
Never mind the scandals in the Texas Youth Commission and state schools for Texans with mental retardation. Or that the Texas Department of Transportation made a $1 billion budget error, and not in the state's favor.

No, for Republicans in the Texas Senate, the most important crisis facing the State of Texas is: voter fraud. That's the first issue the Senate GOP majority addressed Wednesday — the second day of the 81st legislative session.

Voter ID legislation sounds reasonable: require voters to present identification when they vote. In practice, the requirement can be used to intimidate eligible voters — particularly minorities and the elderly — from voting. Minorities and the elderly are, on the whole, more likely to vote Democratic.
In practice, no one has ever shown that Texas has even a minor problem with ineligible voters casting ballots. Before they vote they have to register, and at registration they have to present identification. And voter fraud already is illegal.

But in Texas and other states, some Republicans hope voter ID bills help suppress Democratic voting. However, Senate Democrats in Texas have used the Senate's two-thirds rule to block voter ID legislation in previous sessions, including a dramatic and angry showdown in 2007.

The two-thirds rule effectively bars the Senate from voting on any bill unless two-thirds, or 21, of the senators first agree to bring it up for debate. The Texas Senate has 19 Republicans, 12 Democrats.

Thus, if Democratic senators can muster at least 11 of their 12 members to vote "no," they can block a bill from being debated and voted upon.

(A similar rule applies in the U.S. Senate, where Republican senators, who are in the minority, can use it to block Democratic legislation they particularly object to, or at least force Democrats to compromise.)

The rule is not used only for partisan reasons. Rural senators use it to block bills they think are too favorable to urban interests, for example, and gambling critics rely on it to stop gambling legislation.

But partisanship is exactly what Republican senators had in mind Wednesday. In fact, Sen. Tommy Williams, R-The Woodlands, acknowledged to the Senate that the proposal originally included legislative and congressional redistricting, as well as voter ID, but redistricting was dropped.

The Senate voted along party lines, 18-13, in carving out the exception from the two-thirds rule for voter ID legislation. Only Sen. John Carona, a Dallas Republican, broke party ranks; he said he favors voter ID legislation but objected to the way his party was getting it in light of voter weariness with partisan infighting.

Williams said voter ID has become such a partisan issue that it could not be resolved without bypassing the two-thirds rule. But voter fraud is not actually a problem, so there was no issue to resolve. For most Senate Republicans, party first, Texas second.

---------------------------

Editorial: Dewhurst should avoid playing partisan hand

Dallas News
January 14, 2009

Austin's attention has been on new House Speaker Joe Straus. But there's another drama unfolding in the 2009 Legislature, the course Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst will take.

Dewhurst often has served as a moderate Republican in his six years as the Texas Senate's leader, so chances are he will like having a pragmatic conservative like Straus across the Capitol. They should work better than Dewhurst did with former Speaker Tom Craddick, an ironclad conservative who quarreled with Dewhurst on issues such as school funding.

But here's what could upend the session. Dewhurst is considering higher office, most likely Kay Bailey Hutchison's Senate seat, and may think he must court hard-core conservatives, starting now.
So which Dewhurst will lead the Senate? The moderate conservative who has tried to rein in his party from becoming extreme on issues like budget cuts? Or the Dewhurst who's trying to win over staunch conservatives for another office?

So far, we don't like what we see. The Senate started its first debate yesterday with conservatives attempting to win an exception to the traditional rule that requires senators to line up two-thirds of the body before introducing a particular piece of legislation. In this case, dropping the two-thirds vote would clear the way for the Senate to consider incendiary, unnecessary legislation that would require voters to present a photo ID before casting a vote.

This set the wrong tone for the launch of the usually bipartisan Senate. The two-thirds rule has forced legislators to line up support from the other side of the aisle. When you start making exceptions, who knows where it will lead? Dewhurst doesn't make the rules, but we had hoped he could have stopped the Senate from even going down this partisan path.

For Texans' sake, we hope Dewhurst's moderate-conservative side prevails the rest of the session. Poor Texans' health needs, our cities' air and our public schools won't improve without compassionate leadership. Dewhurst understands these needs. As legislators convened Tuesday, he highlighted some of them.

But will he make the right calls even if it alienates conservatives who don't want a more active government? We're counting on him.

--------------------------

COMMENTARY: ARNOLD GARCIA

Garcia: State senators should tackle the real problems facing Texas

Arnold Garcia Jr., EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR, AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, January 18, 2009

On Wednesday, Texas senators, led — in the loosest sense of the term — by Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, spent the second day of the session rearranging the rules to bulldoze through a voter identification bill. The bill died last session only to be resurrected this go-around by the hand of state Sen. Tommy Williams, R-The Woodlands.

Before we go any further, let's note for the record that voter fraud is a bad thing. That's why existing statutes prohibit it. Let's also note that after spending most of a $1.4 million grant and investing two years at investigating voter fraud in Texas, Attorney General Greg Abbott and his crew came up with a whopping 26 cases of voter irregularity — 18 of them involving ballots legally cast but improperly handled.

Williams declared with all seriousness that voter fraud is a top concern of the state's voters. Maybe it's a top concern with the voters he talks to, but I'd wager that many more are worried about paying for their tickets to the economic horror show now in progress.

Some of the more visionary voters might even worry about how Texas can regain the economic vigor Gov. Rick Perry and other Republican leaders brag about if post-secondary education gets so expensive that working families can't afford it.

Education is a proven escape hatch from poverty or portal between economic classes, so broadening rather than restricting access to learning would seem to be a prudent economic development strategy. Democrats tried to amend the bill to put that concern on the same footing with voter fraud, but the Republican majority wouldn't hear it.

Voters who aren't multi-millionaires might also be concerned about their access to health care. But you only need health care if you're sick, so what's the problem?

The fact that one out of two Texas men will be diagnosed with cancer in his lifetime, according to health experts, takes a back seat to voter identification. The leading cause of death of Texas women between the ages of 35 and 74 is cancer, but that can wait. Cancer is the leading killer of Texas children ages 1 through 14 who die of a disease. But why rush to do something about that when Texas senators have this epidemic of voter fraud to wrestle to the ground?

No doubt that the last words to cross the dying lips of Texans in the final throes of cancer will express gratitude that voter fraud is now history in Texas or soon will be if House members rush to the ramparts to join their Senate colleagues in this epic battle.

According to the Republican majority in the Senate, voter fraud is more important than Texas veterans, Texas health care, higher education tuition costs or even the estimated $9 billion drop in revenue.

Given that, Texas senators may well turn their attention to prostitution — if there's any left after the state's officialdom shut down the famous Chicken Ranch in La Grange back in the 1970s.
The debate on Wednesday reminded me of Larry L. King's "Best Little Whorehouse in Texas," the hit play and move inspired by that episode. When the governor is breathlessly informed that "Texas has a whorehouse in it," he springs into action to correct that stain on the state's honor.
Critics of the voter ID bill note that asking voters to present photo identification at the polling places can be used to intimidate older and minority voters, and that may be true.

But speaking as a voter who has used a driver's license to vote in all of last year's elections — I never got my voter registration card — it wasn't that big a deal. Of course, I'm not easily intimidated.
I question why senators of one of the most important states in the union spent an entire day and stepped all over a history of bipartisanship fixing a roof that the state's Republican attorney general says doesn't leak.

I asked a Republican friend of mine to explain the wisdom of this maneuver. His reply? "There is no wisdom in a stupid act."
agarcia@statesman.com; 445-3667

--------------------------

Where's the problem?
Supreme Court ruling a green light for partisan efforts masquerading as vote fraud prevention.
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

There's a reason why Republican-controlled legislatures are enacting voter ID laws: The voters most likely to be without the required identification are the poor and the elderly, prime Democratic Party constituents whose turnout rate is lower than average to begin with.

This week the U.S. Supreme Court's conservative majority ruled 6-3 to endorse states' right to erect a hurdle to full participation of the qualified electorate in choosing our leaders.

The court opinion authored by Justice John Paul Stevens admitted there was no evidence in the case record of voter fraud in Indiana but also said that plaintiffs had failed to prove that the law imposed an undue burden on voters. The court found that a state has legal justification to mandate such requirements.

A lengthy dissent by Justice David Souter, joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, argued that the contested Indiana law imposes nontrivial hardships on tens of thousands of voters and would lead a significant percentage of them to not cast ballots.

In Texas, evidence of voter fraud that would be prevented by a photo ID requirement also has been lacking. A task force mounted by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott in recent years has spent millions of dollars to make a handful of indictments, all of people who registered illegal voters. The measures that narrowly failed in the Legislature's last session would not have detected those violations.

Academic studies indicate a substantial suppression of turnout in states with voter ID laws, disproportionately among the elderly, the poor and minorities. No state has produced a significant number of cases in which people illegally cast ballots on Election Day by impersonating someone on the voter rolls. That is the rarest form of vote fraud, far more difficult to pull off than manipulation of mail-in ballots or possible in-house tampering with electronic voting machines.

Now that the Supreme Court has opened the door, expect another protracted fight in the next session of the Texas Legislature over a divisive voter ID statute. Voters going to the polls in November should find out the legislative candidates' position on that proposed law and choose accordingly.

If GOP legislators were sincerely concerned about the validity of election results, they would support bills to mandate a paper trail for electronic voting systems, which would make possible verifiable recounts in disputed elections. The fact that some legislators are instead promoting a bogus cure for a nonexistent problem is evidence as to their real motive.

Editorial Round Up

Excerpts from Editorials Opposing HB218 and HB626

Editorial: House Republicans swarm to vote ... hoping that others won't

Austin American Statesman Editorial Board, April 26, 2007

There is so much amiss with the voter identification bill that passed the House this week, it is hard to know what's most offensive. This bill, if it passes the Senate and becomes law, takes Texas back to the bad old days of poll taxes and literacy tests. It's a voter suppression bill, pure and simple. No matter how much its supporters protest that it's not, the bill is designed to suppress certain groups of voters who tend to vote for Democrats: the poor and elderly and minorities.
                       
The legislation, House Bill 218 authored by Rep. Betty Brown, R-Athens, will discourage thousands of voters on Election Day to prevent a handful of people from voting illegally. That is political overkill that can only be explained as a partisan Republican attack.

Senators know these requirements will suppress voting in Texas, and they should see to it that the bills die a quiet death in their chamber.

Editorial: Ballot barriers
Legislation requiring Texas voters to present extensive identification would create far more problems than it would solve.
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle
In Texas, the biggest problem facing our electoral system is the voters' shamefully low participation in choosing our representatives and leaders. Yet instead of encouraging more people to exercise this fundamental right, some lawmakers in Austin are hard at work trying to make it more difficult to vote.

In an essay in the Austin-based Quorum Report, former state GOP political director Royal Masset makes the case that Brown's bill would effectively strip the ability to vote from many qualified Texans. "Anyone who says all legal voters under this bill can vote doesn't know what he is talking about," Masset writes. "And anyone who says a lack of IDs won't discriminate against otherwise legal minority voters is lying."

In the previous legislative session, similar ill-conceived, partisan election bills passed in the House but then expired when the Senate refused to consider them. The bills deserve the same fate this time around.

A poll tax?
Fort Worth Star-Telegram Editorial, Apr. 23, 2007

An insidious scheme to turn back the clock on voting rights in Texas tragically has once again made its way to the state House floor. The architects of this idea, pitched as a noble effort to prevent voter fraud, cannot be allowed to succeed with what is surely one of the greatest assaults on the right to vote in this state since passage of the federal Voting Rights Act in 1965.
.
Recent published reports have indicated that there was an organized effort, allegedly hatched in the White House, to suppress voter turnout during the 2006 election by getting state legislatures to pass more stringent voter identification laws and by conjuring up allegations of widespread voter fraud in some battleground counties and states. Lawmakers should trust our justice system to deal with any balloting irregularities -- unless there's another purpose behind the proposed laws.

---------------------
Unimpeded Polls
Dallas Morning News Editorial, April 25, 2007

People who care about democracy agree on one consistently heartbreaking election result: pathetic voter turnout. It's particularly galling, then, that Texas House Republicans exerted maximum muscle this week in pushing for new roadblocks to the voting booth.  The state Senate would be wise to stop this bad idea.
 
Editorial: The House passes a bad law on voting
Marshall News Messenger, Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Were this issue not so serious, it could be considered quite funny, actually. There is no evidence that there is a problem with "illegal aliens, non citizens" voting, except in the minds of nativists and the delusional. There are no studies showing this is happening, no cases of prosecution showing it is a problem. There is nothing. Zero.
Nada, so to speak.
The bit of good news is that those in the Texas Senate who oppose this bad bill say they have the votes to prevent it from coming up for debate. That would be a good thing, but there is no way of being sure until it happens.
The problem is that the photo ID bill will only keep some people from voting who have the full right to vote and we half suspect this is the real reason for the bill in the first place.
In this age of 50 percent voting in presidential elections and far less in other elections, we do not need another barrier to voting, but we do need to break down barriers.
If we are going to try to solve problems with voter fraud, great, but we should be solving real problems, not those that exist only in the imagination.

---------------------------------

Why does Texas House want to make voting more difficult?
Corpus Christi Caller-Times Editorial, April 25, 2007

And now we come to one of the highlights of the legislative session: the award for the most creative solution to an essentially non-existent problem.

…with a few scattered exceptions, vote fraud is a non-issue in Texas. The stark truth is that
Texas' real problem is not voting fraud; it is voter apathy.

In that context, putting more procedural hurdles in the way of voters is precisely what the doctor did not order. In fact, it conjures up memories of the old poll-tax days, when the system actively discouraged voting by all but the "right" groups.  Fortunately, the House still has time to reverse its field before embarrassing itself further. If it does
not do so, the Senate should - as it has done before with similar measures - deep-six this pernicious
proposal without ceremony.

-------------------------

The real problem
While lawmakers push additional ID requirements for casting ballots, a flawed computer database is purging already qualified voters from the rolls.
Houston Chronicle, 5-5-07

Early balloting around the state for the May 12 election has resulted in long delays and frayed tempers in many locales. The difficulties had nothing to do with the unproven election fraud cited by state legislators as a justification for new laws mandating more extensive ID from voters.
Instead, hundreds of people who went to the polls found their names had been removed because of glitches in a $14 million Web-based state computer program intended to centralize voter registration lists.

In a particularly embarrassing episode, the mayor of Prairie View, Frank Jackson, discovered when he attempted to vote early that his name and registration had vanished from the state-compiled list.

The IBM-Hart InterCivic system had been selected at the direction of former Secretary of State Geoffrey Connor, an appointee of Gov. Rick Perry, despite the fact it cost $800,000 more than a proven competitor, VOTEC. After the purchase, the vendor then substituted an untried computer system that is giving fits to election officials around the state.

Luckily, Harris County is one of 28 Texas counties that saw the problems coming and opted not to link into the system. Officials in those counties are still inconvenienced because they are required by law to enter new voter registrations into the system, a time-consuming process because the new program often rejects entries and deletes original registration numbers. Election officials say it can take up to four times as long to process the registration data using the new program.

Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector Paul Bettencourt was a member of the state advisory committee that recommended against IBM-Hart InterCivic. He says he would never have chosen an untested system and called it "a bad technology system that is coming home to roost." Texas Tax Assessor Association President Cany Arth agrees with Bettencourt.

A bill passed by the Texas House last week would make the secretary of state responsible for authenticating the citizenship of everybody who registers to vote. After seeing the problems that have resulted from the selection of a flawed election data system, lawmakers should reconsider whether they really want to assign that additional responsibility to the secretary of state.

-----------------------------
VOTER ID AND REGISTRATION BILLS SHIFT BURDEN TO INDIVIDUALS TO EXPLAIN THEY DESERVE TO VOTE

Harvey Kronberg in the Quorum Report, April 24, 2007     

What is most troubling about the rash of Republican sponsored bills raising barriers to voting is that they turn the Voting Rights Act on its head.
In passing HB218 on a near-party line vote yesterday, House Republicans began re-establishing the discredited principal that the burden is on the citizen to explain why they should be permitted vote.
Should this bill pass the Senate, some percentage of these classes will arrive at the polls in 2008 only to discover that they do not have sufficient paper work to vote.
Once upon a time, those historically victimized by having undue obstacles placed in their path to vote could count on the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice to act as arbiters. Sadly, it is reasonably well documented that the Civil Rights Division has been so politicized that it has found no burden or impediment to voting too cumbersome to earn an objection.
But what is inarguable is that both HB218 and HB626 return us to the post-Civil War era when the burden was on certain groups of citizens to explain why they deserved to vote.

Excerpts from Published Columns and Press Releases

--------------------------------------

ROYAL MASSET: VOTER ID BILL WILL KILL MY MOTHER'S RIGHT TO VOTE

The Quorum Report, April 23, 2007 www.quorumreport.com.

Under HB 218 my mother, who is a registered voter in Austin, cannot vote in Texas. Anyone who says all legal voters under this bill can vote doesn't know what he is talking about. And anyone who says that a lack of IDs won't discriminate against otherwise legal minority voters is lying.
HB 218 will lower voter turnout. There is no evidence on the record that non-American citizens have voted in past Texas elections in a manner that would have been stopped by HB 218. No testimony was given on HB 218 proving a problem exists that can be solved by requiring extra Voter ID.
HB 218 is a bad bill because it won't work. How does one verify the genuineness of non-photo Ids, almost all of which can be computer generated in seconds? I believe that the integrity of the ballot box will be compromised much more by Bill 218 and its arbitrary enforcement than by fraud involving phony registered voters.

Many proponents of HB 218 talk about how easy it is to get photo ID. In doing so they show how out of touch they are with many Americans such as my mother. If any of them ever cared for an invalid family member, besides talking a good game, they would know invalids don't have recent ID cards and may not even pay bills. When voting in America is only allowed to healthy and wealthy people than the America I know is far sicker than my mother. HB 218 is a direct descendent of poll taxes, and of allowing only white male property owners to vote. In its effect it is racist, barbaric, antidemocratic and contrary to everything that made America great.

Bob Jackson, AARP-Texas state director.
“Election fraud is virtually nonexistent in Texas. This (the Voter ID bill) would particularly hurt seniors, the kind of voters who vote most faithfully, and cast a chilling effect on the ability of many Texans to exercise their right to vote.”

--------------------------------------
Paul Burka, Senior Executive Editor of Texas Monthly magazine, writing on his Burka Blog
“This is a bad old bill. It was part of a nationwide effort, spearheaded by Karl Rove, to suppress the turnout of racial minorities (who are less likely to have picture IDs than more affluent voters). Republicans have told me that this is the most-polled bill of the session. What warped priorities the leadership has. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission reported in December 06 that in its wide reaching interviews of election officials and scholars, ‘Many asserted that the impersonation of voters is probably the least frequent type of fraud’ because it is the most likely to be discovered, there are stiff penalties associated with this type of fraud, and it is an insufficient means of influencing an election.”

--------------------------------------

Don’t restrict the right to vote
Wise County Messenger, Thursday, April 26, 2007

By Raul Salazar, Executive Administrator, League of Women Voters of Texas

From our perspective, any proposal that restricts voter registration or raises barriers to voting in order to deal with the supposed problem of non-citizen voting is a fear-based approach instead of a fact-based solution. We simply have not seen the facts that would justify restricting the franchise.

Researchers found that in the 2004 elections, all voters in states requiring voters to present documentation establishing their identity at the polls, were 2.7 percent less likely to vote than voters in states where no documentation was required. Latinos were 10 percent less likely to vote, Asian-Americans 8.5 percent less likely to vote and African Americans 5.7 percent less likely to vote. HB218, which would require more documents to establish identity at the polls, will also decrease voting by minority voters in Texas.

Voting is the most fundamental expression of citizenship. Breaking down barriers to citizen voter participation from literacy tests to the poll tax has been a constant battle for those of us who believe that every citizen should be able to exercise their right to vote.

We support full voting participation by all eligible American citizens and would hope that this Legislature would join us in seeking ways to improve voter participation rather than restrict it.

(Note: Some editorials only include excerpts)