TERRE HAUTE — How weird is it that the more people drop out of the voting process, the harder U.S. legislators try to make it for people to vote?
Ignore the cynicism, mistrust, boredom and alienation inspired by obscene campaign funding practices and mud-slinging politics as usual. No, sir. What many of our elected leaders have latched onto like pit bulls who’ve heard “Kill!” is voter fraud.
The really weird thing: Almost no empirical evidence of this scourge on democracy exists.
Everybody talks about voter fraud. Lots of state and federal legislators are hot to combat it. But substantial studies of voter fraud — not to mention hard data — are more rare than positive political campaigns. Research that has been done overwhelmingly indicates that massive efforts to curb voter fraud are a remedy in search of a disease.
The U.S. Election Assistance Committee, a federal entity established to prevent more Florida 2000-style messes, is deep into an analysis of election fraud. Several years into the examination, the committee has found that cheating at the polls is “less of a problem than is commonly described in the political debate.”
Not to worry. A handful of anecdotes, many with shaky or false foundations, is all that reform-minded pols have needed to get rolling on extensive and troubling new laws, such as mandatory photo identification.
The pols sell these restrictions to an uniformed public as minor, “common-sense” inconveniences that proud Americans should be happy to experience. After all, who would be discouraged from voting because a government-issued photo ID is mandatory?
The answer: millions of folks, who’ve done nothing to deserve disfranchisement but to be among the old, poor, minority, disabled or student pool of potential voters.
Indiana has led the way in the reform rush. Thanks to the majority in the General Assembly, which voted for our new photo ID law, Hoosiers stand alone this Election Day with the most cumbersome and prohibitive set of voting requirements in the nation.
Florida is nearly as bad but allows voters with no photo ID to cast provisional ballots that can be verified after-the-fact by a matching signature. Indiana requires a provisional voter to show up at the county election board — government-issued photo ID in hand — within 10 days of the election.
As for Indiana’s exemption for the indigent, all a person must do is go to the election board and swear in a public affidavit that he or she is too poor to get an ID. Who wouldn’t want to do that?
Spencer Overton, a professor at George Washington University Law School, sees the mania for sweeping voter reforms as part of an exercise in “Stealing Democracy,” which is why he gave that title to his most recent book. The subtitle: “The New Politics of Voter Suppression.”
Overton is a Harvard Law School grad and former clerk for U.S. Court of appeals Judge Damon J. Keith. He also was a member of the 21-person Carter- Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform. (Jimmy Carter and James A. Baker.) He teaches voting rights, civil rights and property law at George Washington.
Unlike most politicians who go on (and on) about widespread and dangerous voter fraud, Overton has tracked and studied fraud allegations, examined the few genuine investigations and quantified the probable overall incidence.
The man knows his subject, and he says the evidence for such measures as Indiana’s photo ID law is worse than scant. On the other hand, the potential of such laws to drive away legitimate voters is all-too real.
I caught up with Overton in Washington, D.C. via telephone Friday after I’d finished his 66-page analysis for the latest University of Michigan Law Review. Despite its academic tone and density — one page has three lines of text and a 44-line footnote — the professor’s report is clear and backed by numbers, not rhetoric.
He also dismantles some oft-cited cases of “voter fraud,” demonstrating how fast and loose advocates of mandatory photo IDs tend to play with the facts. No one, including most of his fellow Carter-Baker Commissioners and the nation’s news media, escapes criticism for acting on faulty information or for passing it along.
“It is really frustrating,” Overton said in our interview. “This is something that requires time and thought. It’s important to analyze the information. The press wants to be spoonfed easy answers.”
His Michigan Law Review analysis, Overton writes, “is important because political sound bites and media reports have shaped the photo identification debate rather than comprehensive academic analysis. As a result, many Carter-Baker Commission members, Justice Department officials, members of Congress, governors, state legislators, newspaper columnists and average citizens have embraced flawed assumptions by relying on a story or two about voter fraud.”
While such stories are “rhetorically persuasive,” they “often contain false information, omit critical facts or focus on wrongdoing that a photo identification requirement would not prevent.”
Case in point: Wisconsin and the 2004 presidential election. Overton dissects it in detail and discredits it as justification for photo ID requirements. (See related summary.)
“Neither side is focused on real policy solutions,” Overton said Friday of the politicization of photo IDs. “They are talking about sound bites in a 24-hour news cycle or they don’t understand how damaging these (laws) are” to the aims of a democracy.
“The purpose of voting is to ascertain the will of the people,” he said. Requirements guaranteed to exclude significant segments of the population erode that will.
“This is not about individuals, it’s about reducing voter turnout in particular pockets, and that is affecting elections. It is not unlike gerrymandering …” Overton said. “The existing evidence suggests that photo ID requirements would throw out the baby with the bath water because there is a drop of bath water on the baby’s arm.”
Anyone genuinely interested in delving deeper than predictions about voting terrorists should check out Overton’s succinct rebuttal to his Carter-Baker colleagues at carterbakerdissent.com. Also see “Securing the Vote,” the most comprehensive study yet of voter fraud by the non-partisan think tank, Demos (demos.org).
People who believe that anecdotes make good science and should shape public policy, can stick with the likes of Ann Coulter, who opined in September on Fox TV: “Way too many people vote. We should have fewer people voting. There ought to be a poll tax to take the literacy test before voting.”
Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.
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