The Truth About Voter Photo ID


Is A Photo ID Needed?

  • Current laws work. It’s already a felony to vote illegally in NC or to lie when you sign in to vote. Poll watchers can challenge voters and an ID with verified address is required to register in the first place. Less than 5 votes in 1,000,000 in NC involve fraud that a photo ID would stop.
  • Fix the real crisis. Lawmakers were sent to Raleigh to fix the economy and budget, but an ID bill would cost millions to implement – tax money that could save the jobs of teachers and others.
  • Hundreds of thousands. Election officials in South Carolina found that 7% of voters did not have a current ID; 7% would be over 400,000 registered voters in North Carolina who are eligible to vote. Creating new IDs at the DMV and processing voters at the polls will cause longer lines and more hassles for everyone.
  • Unequal treatment. People who vote with a mail-in absentee ballot won’t have to send an ID copy. But fraud can happen with those ballots, too. Why exempt them? It turns out that most absentee ballots in NC are for Republicans, the party of legislators promoting this bill.
  • Discrimination. People of color, students, the elderly, people with disabilities and low-income citizens are all less likely to have a license and more likely to face difficulty getting to the DMV to update their license. The time and money used to get a photo ID is like a poll tax – a barrier long used to deny African-Americans the vote. The photo ID bill is a biased, modern-day power grab.

 

How Other States Handle Voter ID

  • As of Nov 22, 2010, the National Conference of State Legislatures shows that 27 states require registered voters to show some form of ID each time they vote in person. But 22 of the 27 offer much easier access to voting than the current NC GOP proposal to show a photo ID OR voter registration card:
  • 23 of the 50 states don’t require the voter to show a document each time they vote; 27 states do.
  • 12 of those 27 states allows voters to present a wide range of documents, identical or very similar to the Help American Vote Act (HAVA) range of documents.
  • 10 additional states among the 27 allow the voter who doesn’t have the required ID to sign an affidavit or sworn statement, under penalty of a felony, that they are who say they are, and then vote a regular ballot.

So in 45 of the 50 states, the voter is (a) permitted to vote without showing any document, OR (b) required to
show a HAVA-standard document, OR (c) if there’s a stricter standard, allowed to sign a sworn statement and vote.

 

  • 2 other states (Oklahoma as of July 2011 and South Carolina) require either a current government-issued photo ID OR a voter registration card.
  • 1 state (Florida) requires a photo ID, but it can be a buyer’s club ID, student ID, neighborhood association ID, entertainment ID, etc.
  • Only 2 states (Georgia and Indiana) require a government-issued photo ID. In these last five states, the voter can cast a provisional ballot but it likely won’t count unless they return in matter of days to present the proper ID to the election office.

 

(State data from http://www.ncsl.org/default.aspx?tabid=16602)