Voter ID requirements place costly and time-consuming new bureaucratic barriers between voters and the ballot box that will make it harder for all of us to vote. There is no evidence of voter impersonation and Texans face far more urgent problems, but Texas Republicans are following a national Republican agenda to keep failed leaders in office with laws that would reduce turnout among seniors, students, people of color and those with lower incomes.
There is no public policy justification for a Voter ID law. "Voter Impersonation" at the polls - the only type of fraud that could be addressed by a Voter ID law - is virtually non-existent. Despite spending millions on a 2005-2006 Voter Fraud crusade, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott did not find or prosecute one case of Voter Impersonation. A national five year effort by the Bush Justice Department netted only 86 prosecutions from 2001-2006.
A 2006 study by the non-partisan Brennan Center for Justice found that 18% of Americans age 65 and over did not have a photo ID. Here in Texas even the right wing Voter ID advocates at the Texas Conservative Coalition Research Institute admit that 37% of Texans over the age of 80 do not have a driver's license. The same study found that as many as 25% of African Americans do not have a government issued photo ID.
According to data from the US Census Bureau, women are more than twice as likely as men to not to have a drivers' license. In fact, one of every five senior women does not have a license. Furthermore, a woman's name and address on a photo ID may not match the name and address on the voter list due to name changes related to marriage, divorce and other factors. The Texas Department of Vital Statistics reports an average 200,000 marriages and divorces in Texas each year, after which it can take up to two months to get a new ID.
For many seniors and hourly workers, getting a state-issued photo ID is not only costly and time-consuming; it is also difficult if not impractical to get to the forms and information needed to get an ID from agencies with limited locations and hours. Many elderly Texans already have difficulty getting to the polls, and forcing seniors who have no photo ID to gather documents and jump bureaucratic hurdles to get a photo ID before voting is unwarranted and insulting because no one impersonates a voter at the polls.
Nonpartisan academic studies show photo ID laws discourage turnout. An academic study of the 2004 presidential election conducted for the bipartisan Federal Election Assistance Commission found that states with Voter ID laws had an overall turnout reduction of 3%, a figure that reached 5.7% among African Americans and 10% among Hispanics. Former Texas Republican Party Political Director Royal Masset estimated that a photo ID requirement would reduce Democratic turnout in Texas by 3%. |
