Republican legislatures across the country recently issued a more stringent requirement to vote. A government-issued identification such as a driver’s license or a passport must be presented at the polling station to receive a ballot. I find it interesting that today’s Republican Party, which is largely composed of self-identified conservative members, so often sees fit to push forward big government initiatives and they always have excuses to justify their actions. On war they point to the great threat of terrorism, on marriage they point to moral values and the church, on the bank and auto bailouts they cite the inevitable collapse of the American economy. I think the series of voter ID laws passed under Republican state legislatures also fit nicely into this category of big government interventionism.
Democrats claim that lower income individuals and the elderly will be disenfranchised, and compare voter ID laws to the Jim Crow laws. On the flip side, Republicans claim this law will prevent individuals from voting multiple times or from registering their pets and dead relatives to vote. Research on the subject is scarce.
However, Mycoff, Wagner and Wilson looked at voter turnout from 2000-2006 in terms of a photo ID requirement and found that “controlling for the election year, state voter-identification laws produced no statistically significant effects on aggregate state-level turnout. This simple analysis suggests that from 2000 to 2006, state-level aggregate turnout and voter-ID requirements were unrelated.” In other words, both parties are full of it. Because the number of votes in a given election did not change significantly when voter ID laws were implemented, it is likely that fraud doesn’t exist on a significant level in the way that Republicans claim. Likewise, voter ID laws do not impose some sort of barrier to any socioeconomic class in particular when political interest is controlled for, especially because identifications are provided by the state for free.
I would like to argue that transparency would do far more to decrease voter fraud than a photo ID requirement. I would also like to rail against the Republican Party and ask them to return to a consistent Paul Ryan-style small-government conservatism.
Transparency is the number one issue when it comes to voter fraud. Votes should be counted by hand, not by some machine that may be susceptible to many forms of interference. Party officials should open ballot counting sites to the public so that individuals and candidate representatives may verify vote counting is accurate and thorough by checking the official tallies. The biggest vote discrepancies that can be identified are a result of government party officials improperly managing vote totals. During the Republican caucuses in Iowa and Maine, both states had issues in counting and reporting their votes. Iowa party officials counted votes in a secret, non-disclosed location out of the public eye because they were afraid the Occupiers would disrupt the party process. They managed to lose a number of votes somehow, and incorrectly labeled Mitt Romney the winner of their caucus, later rescinding that claim and declaring Rick Santorum actually won. The Maine GOP head managed to lose a number of county votes because the individual in charge of reporting the results said the e-mails she received from the different county heads ended up in her spam folder. This sort of nonsense is unacceptable. Increasing transparency at every level would do far more to stop voter fraud than any ID law would.
I believe the Republican Party, which claims to believe in minimal government, is inconsistent in many of their current platform positions. Voter ID laws, while perhaps well-intentioned, are not effective towards their directed end. These laws create a dependence on the individual to the state, which is exactly the opposite of what the party claims to represent.
Steven is a new member of the Daily Cardinal Opinion Team. Tell Steven what you think of his first article by sending a Letter to the Editor to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
