When Democrats began complaining about Republican efforts to create and enforce voter ID laws I thought that this might be a losing issue for the left. I mean sure they have the facts on their side but that doesn't make for good campaign speeches or sound bytes. After all, what is so controversial about making sure that people who show up to vote are actual citizens? It turns out that there are actually a lot of legitimate American citizens who don't have a photo ID, and those citizens are almost exclusively the poorest and most marginalized citizens; particularly minorities and legal immigrants. Of course, a majority of these citizens are Democrats (if aligned to a party at all), hence the political and partisan drama. Many of these people who lose the ability to vote because they can't prove they are who they say they are. So our efforts to curb a virtually non-existent problem with voter fraud would actually cause much more damage to our democracy than it would help.
So what is a reasonable solution then? There is a proposal floating around that would put photo identification on social security cards. This has been sponsored by former Presidents Carter and Clinton and sounds like a pretty genius idea to me. It would cost about 10 cents per person and would allow every American citizen a free photo ID card, this is helpful far beyond just voting. Having a valid photo ID is a necessity in modern America and the fact that so many people don't have should be seriously troubling to anyone who cares about our great democracy. Somehow this proposal has engendered some level of opposition from both sides, lets explore this a little more fully.
Juliet Eilperin and Karen Tumulty's article in the Washington Post points to three critiques of this idea. Let's start with the most reasonable and work our way down to the more ridiculous. Rep. John Lewis (D-GA.) points out that this could lead to security concerns surrounding identity/data theft. If we allow Social Security Cards to be used as valid identification for a whole host of government interactions they would need to be more secure than the current card are. But lets face facts here, identity theft is already a serious problem, how much would this proposal really add to this already developed problem? I think in this case we need to make a simple cost-benefit analysis, and there is just no way that I think the costs of this problem would outweigh the benefits of allowing every citizen a free government issues photo identification card.
Dale Ho of the Voting Rights Project at the ACLU has a somewhat different concern. He argues that this proposal would still discriminate against people at the margin of society. Relating an anecdote about one ACLU member who had to take an hour bus ride to obtain the necessary hospital records for getting a Social Security Card. I just can't buy this argument. Sure we could go to Alaska and find some native Inuit community living in an area that is only accessible by helicopter and make the argument that this would still be too challenging for them, but does that fact mean we shouldn't help the vast majority of the less affluent people in this country obtain a valid ID? The answer is no. So I assume the objection here is not that the government would offer these photo ID cards, only that it would be coupled with stricter voter ID laws. That is reasonable, these laws are not good for the country. But ignoring the fact that these laws already exist and that people are already being affected by them, and that the courts have shown no interest in intervening, and that more and more they are being adopted by Republican states, and that more people are slipping into poverty as the wealth gap grows and so more people are going to continue to be affected, and that they are effectively having their voices silenced, and that nothing can change unless we get the majority of these people to the polls means we have to act.
Finally, we get to Rand Paul. "This is a really bad idea…This idea would make it easy for the federal government to convert the Social Security card into a national identification card." I'm not sure he gets this proposal, it wouldn't make it easy for a national ID card, it would BE a national ID card. That's the point, we would be enabling people to have a free government issued photo ID card. I get that he is anti-big government and all, but seriously what is so controversial about a federal ID card? It would be controversial if we were required to carry it on us at all times or risk being thrown in jail (I'm looking at you Arizona!) but that is not even close to what is being proposed. Basically this critique argues that the program would work, and somehow that is bad. I just don't get it, but it'll probably stir up some Tea Party juices somehow.
The reason I love this idea so much is that it exposes the Republican voter ID laws for what they really are, poll taxes that are intended from keeping our most vulnerable citizens from having their voices heard. In no way is this about voter fraud except as cover for disenfranchising American who don't agree with Republicans. Never mind all the lessons we learned from Jim Crow era poll taxes and literacy tests. We might as well return to the early days of the Federation when only white male property owners could legally vote. This is such a joke I would laugh if it wasn't also so damn serious. So lets all get out that and have our voices heard on this issue, we have to VOTE… if you can that is...
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