The battle over voting rights will expand this week as lawmakers in Missouri are expected to support a proposed constitutional amendment to enable election officials to require proof of citizenship from anyone registering to vote.
The measure would allow far more rigorous demands than the voter ID requirement recently upheld by the Supreme Court, in which voters had to prove their identity with a government-issued card.
Sponsors of the amendment — which requires the approval of voters to go into effect, possibly in an August referendum — say it is part of an effort to prevent illegal immigrants from affecting the political process. Critics say the measure could lead to the disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of legal residents who would find it difficult to prove their citizenship.
Voting experts say the Missouri amendment represents the next logical step for those who have supported stronger voter ID requirements and the next battleground in how elections are conducted. Similar measures requiring proof of citizenship are being considered in at least 19 state legislatures. Bills in Florida, Kansas, Oklahoma and South Carolina have strong support. But only in Missouri does the requirement have a chance of taking effect before the presidential election.
In Arizona, the only state that requires proof of citizenship to register to vote, more than 38,000 voter registration applications have been thrown out since the state adopted its measure in 2004. That number was included in election data obtained through a lawsuit filed by voting rights advocates and provided to The New York Times. More than 70 percent of those registrations came from people who stated under oath that they were born in the United States, the data showed.
Already, 25 states, including Missouri, require some form of identification at the polls. Seven of those states require or can request photo ID. More states may soon decide to require photo ID now that the Supreme Court has upheld the practice. Democrats have already criticized these requirements as implicitly intended to keep lower-income voters from the polls, and are likely to fight even more fiercely now that the requirements are expanding to include immigration status.
“Three forces are converging on the issue: security, immigration and election verification,” said Dr. Robert A. Pastor, co-director of the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University in Washington. This convergence, he said, partly explains why such measures are likely to become more popular and why they will make election administration, which is already a highly partisan issue, even more heated and litigious.
The Missouri secretary of state, Robin Carnahan, a Democrat who opposes the measure, estimated that it could disenfranchise up to 240,000 registered voters who would be unable to prove their citizenship.
In most of the states that require identification, voters can use utility bills, paychecks, driver’s licenses or student or military ID cards to prove their identity. In the Democratic primary election last week in Indiana, several nuns were denied ballots because they lacked the required photo IDs.
Measures requiring proof of citizenship raise the bar higher because they offer fewer options for documentation. In most cases, aspiring voters would have to produce an original birth certificate, naturalization papers or a passport. Arizona and Missouri, along with some other states, now show whether a driver is a citizen on the face of a driver’s license, and within a few years all states will be required by the federal government to restrict licenses to legal residents.
Critics say that when this level of documentation is applied to voting, it becomes more difficult for the poor, disabled, elderly and minorities to participate in the political process.
Excerpted from MSNBC.comThis article, Voter ID Battle Shifts to Proof of Citizenship, first appeared in Monday editions of The New York Times.
I am really uncomfortable with requiring documentation to vote in general because it does work against the poor, elderly, and disabled--e.g. those people who are less likely to have a driver's license or other type of state ID. This, however, is going over the edge in big way. First, the whole ID thing bugs me because there is no Federally-issued ID card nor a law that requires anyone to have one. Until that is the case, requiring people to show state or federal ID for voting is more than a little troubling. I am fine with IDs to verify who someone is, but the polling places would need to accept any type of ID if they are going to be fair and just about whole thing. Second, and what is probably a larger problem, is that the creation and enforcement of these laws is and would be at the state level, leaving huge discrepancies from state to state--in NC one might need only a utility bill while in Missouri one might be required to show a passport or birth certificate?
I still don't see why election are a state issue and not a federal issue--this is the whole reason that Jim Crow laws were so successful in disenfranchising Black voters for so long. In federal elections, a federal election body should monitor and enforce voting regulations, including acceptable identification, regulations about which parties get on the ballot, and how votes are counted.
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Unfortunately I fear that much like the Jim Crow laws attempted to prevent African Americans from exercising their right to vote - this new "show me your ID" law is an attempt to prevent other minorities from voting. On the one hand it's a horribly horribly negative thing to do - to try to take the rights to voice an opinion through the legal choice to vote is appalling, yet not unexpected. Because on the other hand the fact they are once again trying to put this ridiculous crap into effect shows me that the big fat kings up on their thrones are shaking and afraid because the masses they have kept down and ignored for so long might finally have their say.
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