Ashby 2008

I have said that some portion of the Republican Party no longer believes in the equality of individuals, that they do not believe that all people do have the ability and right to choose the course of their own lives. The recent Indiana law increasing the identification requirements to vote is an example of this loss of faith in humanity. Explicit in the law is the thought that not all individuals have the right to help choose their own government, that there are some people that don’t have the level of integration into our society necessary to justify their participating in the electoral process. Even more so, the Indiana law passed by Republicans is a further example of the strange madness that has gripped the Republican Party and caused it to abandon every principle it had. The Indiana regulation solves a problem that doesn’t exist with a solution that wouldn’t work anyway, requires government to have a higher identification threshold than the private market, and shifts the cost of compliance with the regulation onto individuals. Think about it – the Republicans are pushing an unnecessary, ineffective, unfunded mandate onto private citizens. Newt Gingrich, where are you when we need you?

As background, the Republican Party has made a concerted effort at the state level over the last several years to change various voter registration and identification procedures to make it harder for some people to exercise their right to vote. Primarily people who might tend to vote for Democrats. This effort was part of Karl Rove’s push to show that the Republicans could be even better at gaming the system than the Democrats were. The effort has continued largely unchallenged because the Bush Administration has for all practical purposes shut down the part of the Justice Department that oversaw voting rights violations. A few of the state efforts have been outright silly, and were struck down by lower courts. Some of the efforts were less silly, and upheld by lower courts.

The Indiana case is an example – it was upheld by a judge in a lower court, actually by a very well respected, if conservative, judge. Indiana is now requiring a photo identification before a person is allowed to vote. Previously, people were able to bring two forms of non-photo ID. If someone now shows up at the voting station without a photo ID, they are allowed to vote provisionally, but must go to the local election commission within a period of time to prove who they are. The law was challenged on the basis that some portion of Indiana’s citizens do not have a photo ID, and thus the law infringes on their right to vote.

In the Indiana case, the lower court judge ruled that the law wasn’t unreasonable, because a photo ID is required for any number of private market activities. He noted, for instance, that it could be difficult to cash a check without a photo ID, or board an airplane. Essentially the judge was suggesting that a photo ID was already a requirement for participating in our modern economy, and thus not unreasonable for the state of Indiana to require this same level of documentation.

Except, of course, that a photo ID is not required to participate in the economy. The people who are the plaintiffs in the case, who lack photo IDs, have managed to live their lives just fine. They have managed to hold down jobs, get back and forth from those jobs and shop and live their lives, all without using a photo ID to prove to the private market that they were who they said they were. Unless I am mistaken, the state of Indiana does not require a photo ID to be presented before paying taxes. Yes, the state of Indiana will take a person’s money without a photo ID, but won’t let them vote without a photo ID. The state of Indiana is effectively requiring a higher level of documentation than the private market mandates. Who would have thought – the Republican Party deciding that the free market’s ID requirements were insufficient, and that the government needed to go beyond the free market to correct this insufficiency.

Republicans initially claimed that the laws were necessary because of voter impersonation fraud – one person pretending to be another person, and then using that person’s vote. They had to back off of this position because it is essentially a lie – to my knowledge there have not been any cases of voter impersonation filed in the state of Indiana. The fall-back position of the Republican’s has been that voter impersonation could happen, and the new law was a way of protecting against it before the fact. Yes, the Republicans are arguing that while it wasn’t a problem yet, it might be, and so government action was justified. Who would have thought - the Republican Party wanting government action to solve a problem that didn’t exist.

It’s worth noting that if the problem did exist, this law wouldn’t actually fix it. When Republicans viewed facts as allies, not enemies, they actually tried to imagine how laws would work in real world situations – they tried to compare their assumptions against reality. The Indiana law will certainly make it harder on the crackpot who forgot to register, and so decides at the last minute to try to vote under someone else’s name just so they can have their say in the system. However if a person or a group of people decides to actually steal an election through voter impersonation, it’s pretty safe to assume that they will go that little extra step of creating the fake IDs they need. It’s not that hard, and if someone is that committed to stealing the election, I’m betting that they won’t be deterred by the minimal effort it takes to use a laser printer and laminating machine to do the theft right.

If the Indiana Republican Party really did believe that voter impersonation was a material problem, then the logical solution would be for the state of Indiana to issue Photo ID voter identification cards to all residents, with some kind of built-in technology to protect against forged cards, and then put ID card verification systems at each voting station. However while effective, this solution would obviously cost the state government a fair amount of money. Instead, the state’s solution is to shift the compliance cost to individuals – to make each person have to pay a small sum of money to prove they are who they said they are. Not a large sum, mind you – I can’t imagine getting an Indiana official state identification card costs more than $10 or $20 dollars. Still, on principal, this is a Republican Administration passing a mandate and forcing the cost of the mandate to be paid by private citizens. Who would have thought – the Republican Party actively promoting unfunded mandates.

It is very possible that the Supreme Court will uphold the Indiana law. They might decide that it is nefarious, but not necessarily illegal, because the negative impact on people’s ability to vote can be remedied. The Democrats will have to work a little harder for a while – they will need to spend time before the elections making sure their supporters have a photo ID. The people who want to vote, with a bit more effort and forethought, will still be able to vote. However the case does shine a light on how far the Republican Party has strayed from its principles. There was a time Republicans viewed Democratic gaming of the system as something to be stopped, not topped. There was a time Republicans actually believed all people deserved the right to vote, and that taxation without representation was an affront to our belief in the equality of all men and women.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 12th, 2008 at 6:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, Blogroll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.