Arkansas’s state legislature proposed to insert a constitutional amendment into next year’s ballot, requiring photo identification not only at the polls but even for absentee ballots. Similar legislation is being considered in West Virginia as well. Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate is concerned about the effects all this talk of voter fraud is having on the mass electorate:
“The public is now taking that perception as reality. And my job, and other election officials, is we now have to work extra hard to try to show people all the things we are doing to protect the integrity so they can reestablish the confidence in our voting system.”
Secretary Pate is currently pushing a proposal that seeks to require Iowans to carry unique voter cards equipped with bar codes to verify themselves at the polls. He assures voters that no one will be disenfranchised by this.
Liberals oppose these kinds of measures, claiming such legislation is a means to suppress peoples who typically vote Democratic, particularly minorities who struggle more often to secure drivers’ licenses and other such identifiers for a variety of reasons. The Brennan Center for Justice’s Myrna Perez has fought many voter restrictions in court and says it’s “not whether or not there’s a way we can get the number [of fraudulent votes] down to zero; the question is are the efforts these states are taking to try and prevent this worth who is being disenfranchised in the process.” Perez estimates hundreds of thousands of legal voters will be disenfranchised by these kinds of bills in future elections.
