suspicious voting

[quarrel]

A rather-more-heated-than-normal argument broke out on a friend’s blog regarding voter ID laws. I heard a lot of arguments I didn’t expect to, and they make less sense the more I think about them, to the point where I now wonder if they were put forth as litmus tests to check whether the people on the other side of the issue were sufficiently knowledgeable to be worth debating with.

Most conspicuous was the tag-team claim that voting isn’t a right. These two people are gun-lovin’, gubmint-hatin’ Red Staters, yet they outright stated that suffrage is something the government has to give you, and they offered, as proof, the fact that neither the Constitution nor Bill of Rights defines voting as a right. Thus it’s a privilege, ipso facto & Q.E.D., which means that as long as there’s no law to the contrary, it can be taken away from anyone at any time for any reason. I double-checked with other friends and that basically doesn’t fly. It is a right in this country — it’s just defined & defended mainly by the states.

But that wasn’t the only curiously extreme rebuttal, merely the most egregious.

Liberal Point: Requiring people to show a valid ID before they vote is disproportionately difficult for certain demographic groups.

Rebuttal: Disfranchising some voters cannot possibly be worse than disfranchising all voters, which is what an unreliable voting system does. Therefore any proposed change that increases the integrity of the election process should be made, regardless of how much it costs, how minor a problem it fixes, how little improvement it makes, or how bad its side effects are on subsets of voters.

Point: Voter fraud is rare. Voter fraud through impersonation — that is, going to the polls in person and deliberately lying about who you are to obtain a vote you know you shouldn’t get — accounts for ½% of all illicit votes. One study found only ten confirmed cases, countrywide, in the last twelve years. Yet that is the only kind of illicit voting that ID laws would stop. The vast majority of ineligible votes come from erroneous or fraudulent absentee ballots, mistakes during booth voting, and people who aren’t eligible to register but somehow get registered anyway under their real names and using legitimate IDs.

Rebuttal: You have no reliable idea how extensive voter fraud is. You can never get an accurate estimate of how many people actually perpetrate a given illegal act by extrapolating from how many get accused of it and how many are ultimately convicted. Sure, sure, you can point out that there have been only two thousand alleged cases of fraud in national elections over the last decade, with only a few hundred ultimately confirmed, but that’s meaningless. It’s not the confirmed cases that matter. It’s the actual cases. And you have no better idea than I how many there truly are. Look at how many people do real jail time for sexual assault each year compared to all the claims about how that behavior pervades society to a staggering degree. It’s the same idea.

Furthermore, I’m not talking about national elections exclusively. Preventing a couple hundred illicit votes — even assuming there truly are that few — may not be enough to swing a national election, but it is enough to affect the count for a state representative, or a governor, or a mayor.

Point: Existing voting laws are just fine overall.

Rebuttal: Owning a gun is a greater responsibility than driving a car; you have a greater chance of negatively impacting yourself and others. Thus, it has more government oversight and a more rigorous registration process, to prevent incompetent people from doing it wrong and hurting someone. Voting should, therefore, be even more regimented than gun ownership, by the very same common-sense logic.

Point: Voter ID laws make it harder for tens of thousands of sick, elderly, poor, and minority people to vote.

Rebuttal: You are correct! They absolutely do! But do you know what else makes it harder to vote? Getting sick. Getting stuck in traffic. Having your car break down. Oversleeping because the power went out and your alarm didn’t go off. In all these cases, it would be wrong to relax voting restrictions so everyone can still get their ballots in. When you have a year or more to arrange for a friend or relative to drive your arthritic body to the DMV twice a decade, or do basic research into what alternate forms of ID will suffice and what it takes to get them, you can’t blame failure to comply with regulations on your handicaps or social status. The fault is yours. The government should make one, good rule, and apply it to everyone. Having lax laws on everyone — or even worse, giving some people special dispensation because they can’t be bothered to attend to their civic duties in a responsible fashion — is wrong. Period.

Point: Due to the laws against poll taxes (even indirect ones), requiring people to own an ID to vote is illegal unless there is a government-sponsored program to provide free IDs to people who don’t need to, don’t want to, or can’t afford to buy a paid one. These programs don’t currently exist in all states and would take time and millions of dollars of tax money to implement.

Rebuttal: So? Places like Mexico can do it. That means we can. And if it’s the right thing to do, you do it no matter what it costs.