(NEW YORK) MintPress – As the presidential campaigns heat up, with new polls showing the candidates running neck and neck, the issue of voter ID laws is once again in the spotlight.
Ten states currently have new laws in effect for 2012 with highly restrictive voter ID requirements: Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin.
The laws are so limiting when it comes to who is eligible to vote that these states risk voter disenfranchisement, according to a new study from the Brennan Center for Justice, a voting rights advocacy organization.
“The response of proponents of these laws has been, ‘Well, just get an ID and if in fact you’re too poor to pay for it, we’ll give you the ID for free,’” said Lawrence Norden, deputy director of the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program this week. “Unfortunately for many people, this is not going to be such a simple solution.”
That’s because nearly 500,000 eligible voters in these 10 states do not have access to a vehicle and live more than 10 miles from the closest office where they can obtain the type of identification required to vote in their state, found the study.
In addition, many offices maintain limited or odd hours, such as being open only one day a month. And some eligible voters in those states have a hard time paying for the underlying documentation needed to get the photo identification.
The center estimates that 11 percent of eligible voters in the U.S. do not have the type of photo-issued government ID required by these laws, most of whom are minorities.
Partisan politics
Attorney General Eric Holder recently referred to the new laws as “poll taxes,” which were implemented in the Jim Crow South to keep blacks from voting.
“Many of those without ID would have to travel great distances to get them, and some would struggle to pay for the documents they might need to obtain them. We call those poll taxes,” Holder said during a speech at the NAACP annual conference in Houston, Texas on July 10.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry demanded an apology. “In labeling the Texas voter ID law as a ‘poll tax,’ Eric Holder purposefully used language designed to inflame passions and incite racial tension,” Perry wrote in a statement. “It was not only inappropriate, but simply incorrect on its face.”
The Republican governor called the law “common sense” and said the president should apologize for Holder’s insulting comments. Republicans argue that the laws are needed to prevent voter fraud.
But not everyone agrees. Lester Pines, an attorney for the League of Women Voters, told the Center for Media and Democracy that the Republican Party’s deep interest in seeing voter ID laws upheld is not surprising.
“The registered voters least likely to have the required forms of identification are poor people, minority group members with low socioeconomic status and students, all constituencies that generally vote for Democrats,” Pines said.
Legal challenges
The war of words in Texas comes as voters there await a decision from D.C. District Court judges on whether the state voter ID law discriminates against minorities.
In South Carolina, the Justice Department is pushing to block a new voter ID law, saying it disproportionately affects black voters.
And a judge in Wisconsin has found that the state’s voter ID restriction imposes an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote, writing that the law “tells more than 300,000 Wisconsin voters who do not now have an acceptable form of photo identification that they cannot vote unless they first obtain a photo ID card.”
“That is a lot of people, and most of them are already registered voters,” wrote Dane County Judge David Flanagan, making permanent the injunction he issued against the law in March. In his decision, Judge Flanagan found that the potential burden on voters from Wisconsin’s voter ID law — Act 23 — was great, but the risk of voter fraud very limited.
“Since 2004, voter fraud investigations have been undertaken by the Milwaukee Police Department, by the Mayor of Milwaukee and by the Wisconsin Department of Justice, working with various county prosecutors working through the Attorney General’s Election Fraud Task Force,” he wrote. “None of these efforts have produced a prosecution of a voter fraud violation that would have been prevented by the voter ID requirements of Act 23.”
“Given the sacred, fundamental interest at issue, it is clear that Act 23, while perhaps addressing a legitimate concern, is not sufficiently narrow to avoid needless and significant impairment of the right to vote,” he added.
Before the Wisconsin ruling, Pines of the League of Women Voters pointed out, “If through the use of the Wisconsin Voter ID law, the Republicans can suppress enough Democratic voters, they stand a chance of winning Wisconsin’s electoral votes in November and possibly, thereby, winning the presidency.”
The same is true elsewhere. In Pennsylvania, for instance, the Brennan Center estimates that 750,000 voters lack the required type of photo ID. Barack Obama won that state in 2008 by 600,000 votes.
Meanwhile, with the validity of voter ID laws hanging in the balance in several states, the stakes are high for both sides.