Sunday, January 31, 2010
Editorial: No poll tax by any name
A state House committee's quick passage of a voter photo ID bill should get all the attention it deserves.
From the RoundTable blog
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Voter fraud is not a big problem in Virginia, Republicans' outraged -- and outrageous -- claims to the contrary.
Still, a bill supposedly designed to combat this much-assumed, but little-documented, violation of democratic principles shot out of a legislative committee for a full House vote.
That should have been the end of it. But the GOP has a firm grip on the majority in the House of Delegates. The bill's provision to require a government-issued photo ID at the polls would help keep it that way.
That's the conventional wisdom, anyway, easily read between the lines of HB 498, introduced by Republican Del. Scott Lingamfelter of Woodbridge.
The bill would do away with a provision of the current law that allows a person to vote who lacks ID but signs a statement affirming his identity, subject to felony penalties should it prove to be false.
Instead, anyone who shows up to vote without a photo ID could cast a provisional ballot that the local electoral board would count later, provided the voter produced the ID in person or by fax.
A government-issued photo ID is the GOP's often-stated standard of proof. The party claims it is needed to weed out voter fraud -- that looming threat to self-governance that stirs so many dire warnings before elections, dwindles to a handful of isolated investigations immediately after and then quickly fades from public concern.
Since voter fraud is not a big problem in modern-day Virginia, the GOP effort looks a whole lot more like voter suppression aimed at people on the margins of society -- poor, not very mobile, minority or new Americans, perhaps -- people just scraping by, who logically could be expected to vote Democratic.
Lack of a photo ID is an unnecessary hurdle otherwise qualified voters should not have to clear to exercise their most basic right to participate in their government.
In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Indiana's photo ID law as constitutional, but that doesn't mean every state's law would meet the test.
If Virginia were to pass a similar law, state-issued photo IDs would need to be issued free to the poor, at places easily accessible to them. Anything less would amount to a poll tax -- gussied up to sound noble, but underneath, the same.
