Voter ID laws consumed much of the media’s attention in the run-up to last year’s presidential election, and with good reason. Changing the rules governing who can vote where and when has the potential to reshape the fundamental dynamics of American politics.
The potential for electoral fraud is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to exercising the right to vote in the United States, however — and it is almost certainly not even the most concerning part.
In a vacuum, recent Republican efforts to mandate that voters present government-issued photo identification at the polls before being allowed to vote have merit. A democratic system’s most inviolable right is the right to vote; failing to take all reasonable steps to ensure that only those entitled to that right can exercise it could reasonably be depicted as negligent at best, and requiring the presentation of a basic form of ID would seem to pose little inconvenience to most citizens.
Of course, such voter ID laws as currently encountered in state legislatures across the United States address a problem that doesn’t actually exist. Electoral fraud in the United States is negligible, almost to the point of irrelevancy while successful electoral fraud would of course evade detection, allegations of the practice are also practically unknown.
On the other hand, however, voter ID laws would have a very real and a very pernicious effect on the 3.2 million Americans who don’t currently possess a government-issued photo ID.
Those Americans tend to be disproportionately poor, elderly or members of minority groups groups that tend, in other words, to lean Democratic come election time, to the extent that the passage of a voter ID law in Pennsylvania prompted the state legislature’s Republican leader to declare a (premature) victory for Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election.
Such partisan intent risks framing voting as a privilege rather than a right, to the distinct detriment of the American political process as a whole, and has been fairly criticized as such.
Nevertheless, the American voter registration system remains riddled with errors that both impose an additional cost on citizens and presents the potential for the distortion of elections from the local level to the federal one.
One in four eligible American voters around 51 million people aren’t registered to vote, while 1.8 million dead people are. One in eight active registrations, in all, is invalid or inaccurate including 12 million registrations with sufficient errors to preclude voters being reached by important mailings and 2.8 million people have registrations in more than one state.
The current system, which relies on voters bearing the burden of registration rather than the central government assuming responsibility, differs from most other modern democracies, and visibly so. While Oregon, for example, spent $4.11 per active voter to process registrations, Canada which has registered 93% of its eligible voter has done the same task at less than $0.35 per voter.
More critically, in 2008, more than 2.2 million votes were lost across the United States because of registration problems, a sum that even without any clear partisan bias has the potential to shape notoriously close elections like the presidential race in 2000.
Thankfully, most of the proposed reforms under consideration are largely reflections of common sense. From centralizing voter records and matching them to other information like Social Security data that voters may actually remember to keep up to date to moving the entire process away from cumbersome manual entries to an online database, the issue should be relatively easy to resolve. Far more so than voter ID laws, doing so would offer a fairer and more representative process for all.
Contact Marshall Watkins at [email protected].