Key Democrats Call For Voter ID Investigation

Consider this: 37 states in the union have either passed voter ID laws or are considering doing so. The proponents of those laws claim they’re needed to fight voter fraud — as in people voting who aren’t eligible to do so, or claiming to be someone they’re not.

Taken individually these state-level bills and laws are troublesome. Together they form a pattern that has not gone unnoticed. The Miami Herald reports that 2 members of the U.S. House of representatives Judiciary Committee are calling for an investigation. Reps. John Conyers, D-Mich., and Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y. issued a joint statement;

“As voting rights experts have noted, the recent stream of laws passed at the state level are a reversal of policies, both federal and state, that were intended to combat voter disenfranchisement and boost voter participation,”

13 states have already enacted voter ID laws which Conyers and Nadler say will affect the poor, the elderly and minorities who are less likely to have an official photo ID. The overall effect of the approved laws, according to the Miami Herald report, requires voters to

• present government-approved identification cards,
• curbs voter registration drives by third-party groups,
• curtails early voting,
• ends same-day registration and
• overturns rules that give convicted felons who have served their time the right to vote.

Last month New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice published a report of a study on voter ID that found 21 million people don’t have government issued ID.

Much of this is re-hash; NewsTaco has reported and talked about this many times before. But the fact that Reps. Conyers and Nadler are asking for an investigation sheds new light on the issue. There is a problem, though. The Committee Chairman is Texas Representative Lamar Smith, an arch conservative, vehemently anti-immigrant Republican. 

I say those things because they’re important. Smith is free to be a vehement arch conservative, but it’s more than a definition. I matters because he’s less like to move the investigation forward. Smith’s office had no immediate response to the request.

Conyers and Nadler contend that these state laws raise important questions and constitutional concerns:

For example, they said, “requiring citizens to expend significant funds to obtain a photo ID to vote runs afoul of the prohibition on poll taxes.”

The point is that these voter ID laws could very likely end up before the U.S. Supreme Court. And that would be far from the Judiciary Committee’s purview.