Are Voter ID Requirements Equivalent To A Poll Tax?
On his reader blog, Goon posts about Minnesota’s Rep. Keith Ellison comparing voter ID requirements to a poll tax while giving a speech supporting some legislation that would prevent voter ID requirements in federal elections.
Here’ what Ellison had to say:
Requiring photo IDs to vote in federal elections would be banned under legislation introduced Wednesday by Rep. Keith Ellison, who said such requirements disenfranchise minorities, the poor, women, elderly and young people.
“While photo IDs seem harmless, they are in fact the modern day poll tax,” Ellison, D-Minn., said in a statement.
There are a couple of problems with this argument.
First, every voter ID law that has been passed in this country has had a provision in it to provide ID free of charge to those who a) don’t already have an acceptable for of ID and b) can’t afford to purchase ID. Now, people like Ellison are quick to say that the mere process of having to obtain an ID is in and of itself a tax. But that’s pretty absurd. Every single state in the union (with the exception of my home state North Dakota) requires voters to register before they can vote. The registration process often includes picking up forms at a local government office (or downloading them from the internet, though it’s not likely that the indigent have internet access), filling it out and mailing it in to the proper authorities who, in turn, will mail back a registration card. As an example, here’s the registration process for California.
Now if that process isn’t a “poll tax,” how could obtaining an ID be a poll tax?
Second, what are we say “minorities, the poor, women, elderly and young people” are incapable of securing an ID? Is the suggestion here that women, along with these other demographics, are too uneducated or lazy to go through the rather simply process of obtaining an ID for voting? That’s…rather insulting. Certainly there may be people in the world who may have a hard time getting down to their local court house or DMV to get an ID, but it’s pretty discriminatory to suggest that those people are all going to be women or minorities. What’s more, the number of people who are unable to get an ID is going to be so small as to be almost insignificant. But even so, there will no doubt be groups out there to help these people get the ID’s they need to vote. Just as there are groups now who help the indigent register to vote.
Ellison’s arguments are, frankly, just plain silly. Compared to the anti-vote fraud benefits made possible by requiring voters to identify themselves with some sort of official ID, his concerns (and the concerns of those who think as he do) about a fractional slice of the voting public not being able to ID’s are absurd.
