02.05.08
More On The Voter ID Farce
The second stage of the Indiana voter ID law is worse than the first, (via Election Law blog), Indiana: Requiring IDs, Revoking IDs.
You can’t make this stuff up.
This weekend, the Indianapolis Star reported that the state of Indiana-which is currently defending its law denying the vote to people without government-issued photo IDs before the U.S. Supreme Court-is poised to revoke the IDs of up to 90,000 people. This ID purge is scheduled to happen later this month, right in the middle of the primary season in an important presidential election year, and only weeks before a special congressional election.
This means that, in addition to the 13% of registered voters in Indiana who don’t have current state-issued photo IDs, up to 90,000 more could be blocked from voting because of Indiana’s misguided voter ID law, the most restrictive such law in the country. (Caveat: the state is not physically collecting the cancelled IDs, and so it is not clear what will happen when their holders show up to vote.)
And it’s even worse than it sounds. The reason Indiana is planning to revoke these IDs is because the state’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles ran a computer check and was unable to “match” the bearers’ information against records kept by the Social Security Administration. This kind of computer matching is a singularly misguided and unreliable way to identify invalid ID records. Typos, clerical errors, and other irrelevant discrepancies in BMV and Social Security databases typically cause a huge number of match failures between perfectly valid government records. A person listed as “Bill” on his driver’s license but “William” on his Social Security card will fail to match; so will a woman whose driver’s license is in her married name but whose Social Security records are in her maiden name.
When other jurisdictions have tried record matching in the voting context, there were match failures for up to 20-30% of would-be voters. When they tried to match records against the Social Security database, as Indiana has done here, the match failures have risen to 46.2%. Erroneous match failures are typically more common for people of color, as the Brennan Center recently found when it analyzed Florida’s match files in connection with an ongoing lawsuit. Again, these match failures are not indicative of any problems with the voters. After initial efforts to investigate these mismatches in Indiana, a BMV spokesperson admitted that “[t]he great majority of mismatches that occurred were what we would call innocent or inadvertent kinds of things.”
This story is truly disturbing. Just imaging our current Texas GOP controlled state government having this kind of power. I seem to remember something about a voter purge in Florida before the 2000 presidential election.
Eye on Williamson » US Supreme Court Allows Voter ID Law To Stand said,
April 28, 2008 at 10:06 pm
[...] purposes, non-existent. For some background here’s some history on the issue and the kind of voter suppression, and partisan politics that could happen as a result of a law like this in Texas. And for a refresher on what kind of [...]