Lone Star status

If you’re registered to vote – and I hope you are – you know what a Voter Registration Certificate looks like; it’s a paper card, wallet-sized (after you cut along the dotted lines), that you carry around so you can show it each time you go to the polls.

At the polling place you must present the card before you get to vote, and before you are given a ballot the card is stamped or otherwise marked to show that you’ve voted. If you’ve lost your card there could be all kinds of bureaucratic shuffles to go
through before you will be allowed to vote.

Just to make sure you haven’t died between elections or moved away, a new card is mailed out every couple of years, and if you skip too many elections you’ll have toregister again.

A polite way of keeping the voting process neat and tidy.

And every couple of years, here lately, the Republicans in the Texas legislature decide that’s not enough. Claiming rampant voter fraud, they introduced legislation in 2005 and 2007 to create a law requiring every voter to produce photo ID in addition to a registration certificate.

The Democrats adamantly oppose such restrictions, arguing that folks who are too old or too poor to drive -- or don’t know how to drive -- are most likely to be without a driver’s license. Coincidentally, these are the kinds of people who tend to vote for Democrats. Interesting.

As is the fact that Republican efforts to pass a voter ID law seem to have picked up as their majority has dwindled.

Here’s what the current issue of Texas Monthly has to say about it all:

For three years during George W. Bush’s presidency (2002 to 2005), the U.S. Justice Department mounted a federal Ballot Access and Voting Integrity Initiative, which found only 38 cases of voter fraud, resulting in only 13 convictions and 11 guilty pleas.

That’s nationwide, my friends. Across 50 states.

And, according to the magazine,

In Texas the pickings were equally slim. Attorney General Greg Abbott received a federal grant to investigate voter fraud and other crimes, resulting in just 30 indictments and 22 prosecutions so far: all reportedly against Democrats, most involving technical violations.

Improperly completed registration forms, transposed numbers, that kind of stuff.

Texas Monthly’s article concludes:

The reason that so little evidence of fraud can be found is simple: There’s no incentive for voter impersonation. The chance to influence the outcome of an election is too small; it would take an enormous number of people, all committing fraud at once, to make a difference.

Well, the legislation has passed through the Texas Senate, where the Republicans have a hefty majority, and is headed for the House, where they outnumber the Democrats by only 76 to 74. Reason may yet prevail.

Or who knows? Maybe they’ll decide to have us voters dip our fingers in purple ink.

Seriously, defeating this legislation is important, I believe, and not least because it brings out the Boston tea-party libertarian streak in me. As in: What!? Yet another layer of law to be imposed on the citizenry?

If you agree, this would be a good time to call Jim Pitts, or send him an email and urge him to vote against the voter ID legislation.

Originally published in Waxahachie Daily Light, March 23, 2009