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Blocking the vote

The commission on election reform's proposal to require voters to present a photo ID would keep millions of honest Americans away from the polls.

The most conspicuous problem in American elections is not that some ballots may be cast fraudulently but that so many eligible citizens do not vote at all. To fix the lesser evil, a prestigious commission chaired by James L. Baker III and former President Jimmy Carter is, incredibly, proposing to make the greater danger even worse.

The Commission on Federal Election Reform says voters should be required to present at the polls what amounts to a national identification - a driver's license or other photo card - to be issued by states subject to federal standards. Like a rotten apple, that one spoils a bushel of otherwise good ideas.

As the commission concedes, there are a lot of people - minorities, elderly, the poor - who don't have drivers' licenses. So it says that the alternative IDs should be dispensed free of charge and from convenient locations.

But that's not how the real world usually works. Carter's own state of Georgia is being sued, as it deserves to be, over a new picture ID law that has been called the functional equivalent of a poll tax (see editorial below).

The best that can be said of the Baker-Carter proposal is that it is naive.

Documentation is rarely a problem for the sort of prosperous, professional people who make up the typical blue-ribbon commission. But in the larger world, post-9/11, it has become as difficult to obtain a driver's license as to qualify for a passport. Imagine asking Hurricane Katrina refugees, for example, to produce their birth certificates, Social Security cards and some form of picture ID.

Curiously, the commission - like the Georgia Legislature - would let absentee votes continue to be cast by signature only. Absentee voting is infamously prone to manipulation. Tacitly acknowledging this, the commission says that candidates and parties should not be allowed to distribute and collect absentee ballots. But guess which part of that bargain likely would not survive the legislative process?

Some members of the commission had the noble motive of ultimately making it easier for people to vote. But the ideal of a one-time permanent registration, easily updated as the voter moves from city to city or state to state, did not survive the early give and take. What did emerge more nearly resembles an assault on the right to vote.

The pity of it is that the commission, whose members included Florida's own Betty Castor, recommended many good ideas, notably a system of regional presidential primaries - enforced by Congress if necessary - to stop the absurdity of having nominees selected by as few as 8 percent of the voters as early as March in each election year. It also called for automatic restoration of voting rights for most felons who have paid their debts to society, nonpartisan administration of elections, and paper trails where electronic voting is used.

But even these reforms are not worth it if they come at the price of a monstrously bureaucratic identification scheme that would bar the polling places to millions of honest Americans.

[Last modified September 24, 2005, 01:00:22]