voter ID redux

Yet another person I follow has come down on the “pro” side of voter ID laws. He started by playing the “you can’t prove a negative” card, to wit: reports that a problem is happening are evidence that it’s happening, but a lack of reports that a problem is happening is not evidence that it isn’t, just like finding Bigfoot would prove he’s real but not finding Bigfoot doesn’t prove he isn’t. Effectively, this fellow claims that the number of people who vote fraudulently cannot be estimated — not even roughly — by extrapolating from how many people are accused and/or found guilty of it, and he goes on to assert that double-checking the validity of these allegedly illicit voters would, in fact, be the most straightforward way of finding them (or stopping them). As evidence that the problem is bigger than arrest records indicate, he cites how the state of Michigan recently estimated it has 4,000 improperly registered non-citizens, based on finding about 1,000 non-citizens among the 58,000 driver’s license and ID records they examined. (Then again, they found an actual voting history for only about fifty of those thousand, at an average of two votes per person.)

He claims that, ultimately, requiring ID to vote will prove to be an impassable barrier to fewer than dozens of people per state. He honestly believes this number to be at least an order of magnitude lower than the number of illicit votes getting cast right now, and that that latter number is great enough to swing electoral counts. He agrees completely that requiring an ID to vote will add a burden to many people, no question about it. However: A) it will still be less of a burden than many people suffer already — people who nonetheless vote anyway, since it is not unreasonably burdensome and since voting is a responsibility as much as a right; and B) there is no historical defense supporting the idea that it’s better to risk having non-citizens vote than to deny suffrage to rightful citizens. Yes, with the justice system here, there was a deliberate decision to err on the side of caution and often let probably-but-not-quite-provably guilty people go free as the price of minimizing the number of incarcerated innocents, but the claim on the table is that the Founding Fathers did not hold an analogous view toward voting. They thought — and we should think — that one illicit vote is just as bad as a silenced proper one rather than accept a many-to-one ratio.

I don’t think he’s correct on his first point. (The number of transgendered people alone who’ll suffer ID-related voting problems is projected into the tens of thousands.) I admit the election-swinging is possible, but he gives no evidence for it, just some plausible scenarios for how it could be present but undetected. Moving beyond his points, I believe there is a clear pattern of ID laws being championed by people who care more about the suppression they have on left-leaning demographic groups than about the overall integrity of the electoral system, and I don’t understand the focus on ID checks when the bulk of the problem is people who aren’t eligible to vote but get registered anyway (not necessarily even committing deliberate fraud!) and then tell the truth about who they are at the ballot box.

So what’s my problem? I mean, I’m right and he’s wrong, right? But…how do I know that? After all, in general, if you disagree with someone who is more accomplished than you, better educated in general, and more knowledgeable about the topic at hand, you’ve probably made a mistake somewhere. That’s just where the smart money lies.

I can’t put this one to bed yet.