Surprisingly, requiring voters to have a valid photo identification has created a great deal of controversy. Many people seem to believe that it should be easier to vote, than it is to purchase a bottle of alcohol.
Here is a brief description of the Texas law from the website for the Texas Secretary of State --
http://archive.is/AZFO4
http://votetexas.gov/register-to-vote/
Required Identification for Voting in Person
Don´t have a photo ID for voting? Election Identification Certificates are available from DPS driver license offices during regular business hours. Find mobile station locations here.
Frequently Asked Questions
In 2011, the Texas Legislature passed Senate Bill 14 (SB 14) creating a new requirement for voters to show photo identification when voting in person. While pending review within the judicial system, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, which effectively ended all pending litigation. As a result, voters are now required to present an approved form of photo identification in order to vote in all Texas Elections.
This requirement is effective immediately.
Here is a list of the acceptable forms of photo ID:
- Texas driver license issued by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS)
- Texas Election Identification Certificate issued by DPS
- Texas personal identification card issued by DPS
- Texas concealed handgun license issued by DPS
- United States military identification card containing the person’s photograph
- United States citizenship certificate containing the person’s photograph
- United States passport
And it is not hard to find articles like these, that bring to mind the Biblical character of Job, in their descriptions of the struggles of some Texans to satisfy the new law in order to be eligible to vote —
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/07/texas-voter-id_n_6117742.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20171008172909/https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/07/texas-voter-id_n_6117742.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/30/texas-voter-id_n_6076536.html
http://archive.is/Db3aw
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/oct/27/texas-vote-id-proof-certificate-minority-law
The first article listed above, entitled 'Texans Slam Voter ID Law: 'Now That It's Happened To Me, I'm Devastated', describes the difficulties of three women in obtaining identification that satisfied the new Texas law — two of whom were unable to vote as a result. Each woman either had an expired Texas driver's license, or no Texas driver's license at all. The woman who was able to vote, was able to obtain a Texas identification card. The other two women either did not have their birth certificate, or did not have a name change document (certificate of marriage/divorce) to explain why their name did not match their birth certificate --
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/07/texas-voter-id_n_6117742.html
Texans Slam Voter ID Law: 'Now That It's Happened To Me, I'm Devastated'
Betty Thorn, an 84-year-old grandmother who lives in an assisted-living facility in Austin, Texas, has voted in every major election in her life since she became eligible. But Thorn didn't vote this year, her granddaughter says. Thanks to Texas's new voter ID law, considered one of the strictest in the country, she couldn't get the right identification.
Amy Gautreaux, Thorn's granddaughter, told The Huffington Post that Thorn's driver's license had lapsed because she doesn't drive anymore. Gautreaux found time a few days before the election to take Thorn to the driver’s license office to get a regular ID, but her proof-of-address documents weren’t sufficient. The two asked for an election identification certificate, but Thorn didn't have her birth certificate, so she couldn't get that either. (The Austin North Lamar driver's license office could not be reached for comment.)
...
Thorn is one of the hundreds of thousands of Texans whom Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg predicted might have trouble voting after the Supreme Court ruled that Texas could implement a restrictive voter ID law in this year’s midterm elections. The law has strict identification requirements, allowing concealed carry permits and election identification certificates to serve as voting documents, but not out-of-state or student IDs. The Supreme Court didn’t rule on whether the law was constitutional, a question that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit is now expected to take up.
…
Brenda Lauw, a 62-year-old great-grandmother and former teacher, has spent almost two decades in Texas, including a 14-year stretch from 1978 to 1992.
…
Lauw decided to move into an RV to save money. She now lives in her RV in Crystal Beach, Texas, which she said is “cool as heck” because she doesn’t have to rely on government housing. But it makes proving her residency difficult.
Though she's now based in Texas, Lauw still has a Louisiana driver’s license. She has tried to get one from Texas, but all the documentation she provided to The Huffington Post -- including her teaching certificate and her honorable military discharge from her time in the Army -- is under her married name. Lauw, who is divorced, has her birth certificate but not her marriage and divorce certificates or two proofs-of-residency, all of which she needs in order to get a Texas driver’s license.
Lauw didn’t bother trying to register or get an election identification certificate for this election, because she was discouraged by the new law and she thought she wouldn't meet the requirements. She was partially right: While a proof of residence isn’t needed for the voting card, Lauw would have needed to show a marriage or divorce certificate.
…
Madeleine Pearsall, 61, also ran into trouble with the new law. She moved to Austin, Texas when she was just five weeks old. “I never put my feet down anywhere but Austin,” she told The Huffington Post. She’s a Democrat, but keeps a framed picture of former President Richard Nixon on her wall because he signed the 26th Amendment as a witness after it was ratified by the states, giving her the right to vote the year she turned 18.
Last month, when Pearsall first tried to vote early, she learned she was unable to do so. She was on a payment plan to pay off parking tickets, and her license had been expired for too long, rendering it unfit under Texas’ new law.
“Driving is a privilege, but voting is a right,” she said. “I’ve always been so proud to vote, because I have friends who went to Vietnam and didn’t come back, and they couldn’t vote.”
Last Friday, Pearsall went to a driver’s license office on South Interstate 35 to get an election identification certificate. She was told she couldn’t get one because she didn’t have the right documentation, she said. When she realized she might not be able to vote this year, she raised a fuss. “I didn’t cuss, but I’m loud,” she told HuffPost.
Officers were called to address the disturbance, the Austin Police Department confirmed. It turned out that Pearsall did still qualify for a regular Texas identification card, which cost money. Pearsall said a trooper offered to help pay for it. The cops “got it," she said, "how wrong this was."
…
The second article listed above, entitled 'Ginsburg Was Right: Texas' Extreme Voter ID Law is Stopping People From Voting', provides similar content. This article gives more details about Madeleine Pearsall, one of the women mentioned in the previous article above, in addition to the story of a dishwasher who cannot afford to replace a stolen birth certificate --
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/30/texas-voter-id_n_6076536.html
Ginsburg Was Right: Texas' Extreme Voter ID Law Is Stopping People From Voting
WASHINGTON -- A Texas voter ID law considered to be one of the most restrictive in the country is doing exactly what Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned it would do: stopping Americans from voting.
A disabled woman in Travis County was turned away from voting because she couldn’t afford to pay her parking tickets. An IHOP dishwasher from Mercedes can’t afford the cost of getting a new birth certificate, which he would need to obtain the special photo ID card required for voting. A student at a historically black college in Marshall, who registered some of her fellow students to vote, won't be able to cast a ballot herself because her driver's license isn't from Texas and the state wouldn't accept her student identification card.
…
Dana DeBeauvoir, the clerk responsible for overseeing election conduct in Travis County, which has over one million people and includes the city of Austin, said she spoke this week to a 61-year-old disabled woman, Madeleine, who was “in tears” because she was turned away when she went to vote at a grocery store.
The low-income woman is on a payment plan with a court to pay off her parking tickets, DeBeauvoir said, and while she’s on the plan, her license is suspended. Now, Madeleine has to quickly get to a driver’s license office to get a voting card. Her disability qualifies her to vote by mail, but she missed that deadline because she didn’t know her license would be denied.
…
Jesus Garcia, 40, was born in Texas. He has his voter card as well as an expired form of photo identification that works just fine for most purposes. But under the Texas law, that isn't enough proof, because his ID has been expired for too long. Getting another form of identification is difficult because his birth certificate, along with his wallet, was stolen about a year ago.
"I'm barely working, I don't have enough money to get my ID," Garcia, who works as a dishwasher at an IHOP restaurant, told HuffPost. He would have to pay roughly $30 to obtain a new copy of his birth certificate and a new card, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Garcia has made two trips to the Department of Public Safety to obtain an identification card, but has been unsuccessful. He believes the law was passed to make it more difficult for people like him to vote.
"If I had money to go get my birth certificate and all that, I wouldn't be having trouble right now," Garcia said. "But like I said, money's down."
…
Regarding Jesus Garcia's belief that the Texas law (SB 14) was passed to make it more difficult for people like him to vote — well, of course the law was passed to make it more difficult for people like him to vote — that is, people who cannot prove that they are an eligible voter. The voter registration card and the unspecified 'expired form of photo identification' mentioned in the article above, do not prove citizenship (or anything else). There is no way to know what the phrase 'expired form of photo identification' even means, and anyone can get a voter registration card in Texas —
http://votetexas.gov/register-to-vote/550-2.html
http://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/voter/reqvr.shtml
Jesus Garcia may be an eligible voter, but the identification he possesses does nothing to prove that. Should he be allowed to vote simply because he wants to?
And notice the absurdity of the position attributed to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, from her dissenting opinion in 'Veasey v. Perry', that the Texas Voter ID law will stop people from voting — again, of course.
That is the whole point of any enforcement of a voting regulation — to prevent ineligible individuals from voting.
In the same way, states can set an age requirement for voting, as long as they do not enforce a minimum voting age that is greater than 18 years, in violation of the 26th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Again, the point of an age of eligibility is to prevent immature individuals from voting, which, by definition, stops people from voting.
The question is not whether people will be stopped from voting by more stringent identification laws, but how many fraudulent votes will be eliminated — reducing the number of fraudulent votes is the obvious goal, since fraudulent votes are always a possibility, and something must be done to prevent them.
Of course, Justice Ginsburg assumes eligible voters will be prevented from voting, and she dismisses voter fraud as unimportant, even though it is not hard to find evidence that it is easy to commit, and can easily go undetected. In Ginsburg's dissent in 'Veasey v. Perry', she gives this favorable mention of a statement in a District Court's ruling, regarding the supposed lack of necessity of Texas Senate Bill 14, because there were only two convictions for voter fraud in Texas, in the nine years prior to the bill's passage --
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14a393_p860.pdf (see p.5)
...
The District Court also found a tenuous connection between the harms Senate Bill 14 aimed to ward off, and the means adopted by the State to that end. Between 2002 and 2011, there were only two in-person voter fraud cases prosecuted to conviction in Texas. Op. 13–14.
...
Of course, this is not surprising given how easy it is to commit voter fraud without being detected.
For example, consider this 2013 report, from the 'New York City Department of Investigation' (DOI) — 'Report on the New York City Board of Elections’ Employment Practices, Operations, and Election Administration'. In addition to demonstrated cases of vote fraud (DOI investigators were repeatedly allowed to vote as an ineligible voter), the report also documents various forms of corruption in the 'New York City Board of Elections' (BOE), such as nepotism, and time charging fraud (employees punching each other's time cards, for example). Here are a couple of paragraphs from the introduction of that report — notice that DOI investigators were able to vote in almost all cases with the name of an ineligible voter, even in certain instances, when the age of the investigator differed from the recorded age in the voter registration book by as much as 50 years --
http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doi/downloads/pdf/2013/dec13/BOE_Unit_Report12-30-2013.pdf
https://www.google.com/search?q=new+york+city+department+of+investigation+public+reports
• Voter Roll Deficiencies. After receiving an allegation from a former BOE employee that ineligible voters remained on the voter rolls, DOI checked multiple databases at random to generate a list of approximately 175 individuals who had either died, become a convicted felon, or had moved outside the City. Using that list, DOI ascertained that they had each at one time been registered voters in the City. During DOI’s Citywide 2013 Election Day investigative operations, DOI sought to determine whether any of them remained in BOE’s registration books and to test whether investigators using the names of those ineligible individuals would be permitted to vote. DOI found that 63 of the ineligible individuals (or 36%) were still listed as eligible voters in the registration books at poll sites. The majority of those 63 ineligible individuals remained on the rolls nearly two years or longer since a death, felony conviction, or move outside of the City.
DOI investigators posed as the 63 ineligible individuals still on the voter rolls and were permitted to obtain, mark, and submit ballots in the scanners or the lever booths in 61 instances (or approximately 97%).2 In five instances, DOI investigators in their twenties and thirties posed as individuals whose ages, as recorded in the registration books, ranged from 82 to 94, and despite the obvious disparity, the investigators were given ballots or access to lever booths without question by the BOE poll workers.
...
Not surprisingly, when the 'New York City Department of Investigation' report quoted above became public back in late 2013, the 'New York City Board of Elections' took no responsibility, and attempted to shift blame to the DOI for revealing the BOE's incompetence —
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/board-elections-slams-investigators-posed-dead-people-article-1.1569328
https://web.archive.org/web/20180306005727/http://www.nydailynews.com:80/news/politics/board-elections-slams...
Is there a reason to believe that the New York City BOE is some kind of anomaly in its incompetence documented in the DOI report? It is more likely an anomaly that anyone in a city bureaucracy was willing to go public with such problems — not that such problems exist.
And finally, the third article listed above from theguardian.com, entitled '"Born and raised" Texans forced to prove identities under new voter ID law', is a pièce de résistance of reporting in encouraging people to view requiring voters to obtain a photo ID as a dramatic tragedy. This article profiles Texan Eric Kennie, who has lived in Austin Texas his entire life. Kennie now supports himself as a 'scrapper' — he sells recyclables that he gathers from people's garbage. Kennie typically makes about $15 to $20 a day, so when he had to buy a birth certificate for $23, in order to obtain a Texas Election Identification Certificate, it was a big deal to him.
But even after obtaining his birth certificate, Kennie still could not get an Election Identification Certificate, because he is not using the name shown on his birth certificate — his birth certificate shows his last name as his mother's maiden name (Caruthers). And in order to correct this discrepancy, Kennie would have to go to court and ask for the name on his birth certificate to be changed to correct the error — but for that he would supposedly need to hire an attorney, which he cannot afford --
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/oct/27/texas-vote-id-proof-certificate-minority-law
http://archive.is/2ZfQ3
'Born and raised' Texans forced to prove identities under new voter ID law
Eric Kennie is a Texan. He is as Texan as the yucca plants growing outside his house. So Texan that he has never, in his 45 years, travelled outside the state. In fact, he has never even left his native city of Austin. “No sir, not one day. I was born and raised here, only place I know is Austin.”
…
Before SB14 came into effect, Kennie was able to vote by simply showing a voter registration card posted to his home address. Under the vastly more stringent demands of the new law, he must take with him to the polling station one of six forms of identification bearing his photograph. The problem is, he doesn’t have any of the six and there’s no way he’s going to be able to acquire one any time soon.
The first of the six forms of ID accepted under SB14 is a US passport. No luck there. What would someone who has never even crossed the city boundary of Austin do with a passport?
The second is a US military ID card, but Kennie has never been in the military. The third is a driving licence, but he doesn’t have a car and has never possessed a driving licence.
The fourth is a license to carry a concealed handgun. “I did have my own gun when I was about 14 or 15,” he said, “but that was 30 years ago.” The fifth is a citizenship certificate, and no, he doesn’t have that either.
And then there’s the sixth method of identification allowed under the law. It’s a new form of photo-ID card created specifically for voting under SB14, known as an election identification certificate (EIC).
To get an EIC, Kennie needs to be able to show the Texas department of public safety (DPS) other forms of documentation that satisfy them as to his identity. He presented them with his old personal ID card – issued by the DPS itself and with his photo on it – but because it is more than 60 days expired (it ran out in 2000) they didn’t accept it. Next he showed them an electricity bill, and after that a cable TV bill, but on each occasion they said it didn’t cut muster and turned him away.
Each trip to the DPS office involved taking three buses, a journey that can stretch to a couple of hours. Then he had to stand in line, waiting for up to a further three hours to be seen, before finally making another two-hour schlep home.
In one of his trips to the DPS last year they told him he needed to get hold of a copy of his birth certificate as the only remaining way he could meet the requirements and get his EIC. That meant going on yet another three-bus trek to the official records office in a different part of town.
The cost of acquiring a birth certificate in Texas is $23, which may not sound much but it is to Kennie. He is poor, like many of the up to 600,000 Texans caught in the current voter ID trap.
He works as a “scrapper”, foraging in people’s garbage to collect cans, bottles and metal for recycling. Sometimes he comes across trinkets that he can restore. There are several chime bells dangling in the porch of his house, and a cordon of wooden Nutcracker dolls standing guard by the front door. A porcelain model of a laughing pig is staked quizzically on a poll by the drive.
On a usual day he makes about $15 to $20 from recycling the cans and other scrap. On a good day – after a holiday like Valentine’s Day or Easter when people consume more – his earnings can rise to as much as $40 a day. He has no bank account or credit cards, and no savings – he only deals with cans and cash.
…
The outcome was perhaps predictable by now: the birth certificate wasn’t up to scratch either. When he took it to the DPS (another three buses there, three buses back, another two hours waiting in line) they told him that the name on the birth certificate didn’t match the name on his voter registration card. The birth certificate has him down as Eric Caruthers – his mother’s maiden name – even though his parents were married at the time he was born.
…
In Eric Kennie’s case, there is no clear way out of the morass. He could go to court and ask for the name on his birth certificate to be changed to correct the error, but that would take hiring a lawyer for a fee that he could not afford.
Or he could swallow his pride and take up the identity given on his birth certificate – turning himself into Eric Caruthers. He doesn’t want to do that – he said it would make his deceased father “turn in his grave”. It would also be profoundly ironic: he would in effect be impersonating someone else in order to get around a law ostensibly designed to root out impersonation at the polls.
…
Many people consider any fee charged to individuals by state agencies to enforce voting laws to be a poll tax, and Justice Ginsburg is among them. Here is the closing quote from her dissenting opinion cited previously --
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14a393_p860.pdf
...
The greatest threat to public confidence in elections in this case is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters. To prevent that disenfranchisement, I would vacate the Fifth Circuit’s stay of the permanent injunction ordered by the District Court.
And notice Ginsburg's claim of a risk of eliminating hundreds of thousands of legitimate votes.
Since a midterm election was just held with the controversial Texas voter identification law (SB 14) in effect, we can look at the turnout numbers to gauge the impact of the law.
Here are two tables from the website for the Texas Secretary of State, showing the number of votes in Texas for the last two midterm elections, in 2010 and 2014. The 2013 and 2014 elections are not comparable, because voter participation was much lower in the 2013 cycle (it was a Texas constitutional amendment election). In the 2014 election, the overall Texas voter turnout dropped by 271,314 votes (from 4,979,870 to 4,708,556), versus the 2010 election, but notice that the total turnout among Republican voters went up by 52,746 in 2014 (from 2,737,481 to 2,790,227) --
http://elections.sos.state.tx.us/
http://elections.sos.state.tx.us/elchist175_race833.htm
http://archive.is/gYrHO
http://elections.sos.state.tx.us/elchist154_race833.htm
http://archive.is/uPLVb
Of course, it is easy to find opinion pieces that blame the reduced Texas voter turnout in the 2014 elections on the state's more restrictive identification law.
And it looks like Justice Ginsburg's estimate of the risk, at hundreds of thousands of eligible votes, was pretty close, doesn't it? You would think so, but only if you did not compare the voter turnout in the 2011 and 2013 Texas constitutional amendment elections.
Texas holds constitutional amendment elections every two years, so voters can decide on amendments that the Texas legislature has approved for a vote. 2011 was the last year that Texas had a constitutional amendment election before their controversial voter identification law passed, and 2013 was the first year that Texas had a constitutional amendment election under their new identification law. Turnout increased from an average of just over 5% in the 2011 amendment election, to just over 8% in the 2013 election. Here is an article on cnn.com describing this increase --
http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/12/opinion/preston-texas-id-laws/
http://archive.is/TWsCe
...
So, in terms of raw votes, turnout in 2013 increased by about 63% over turnout in 2011 in comparable elections. But that's statewide. How about in areas the anti-voter ID side predicted should see "suppression"?
Turnout for the 2011 election was 5.37% of registered voters; for 2013 it was about 8%.
Democrats allege that voter ID will suppress the vote in predominantly Hispanic regions. Hidalgo County sits on the Texas-Mexico border and is 90% Hispanic. In 2011, an average of just over 4,000 voted in the constitutional amendment election. In 2013, an average of over 16,000 voted.
If voter ID was intended to suppress votes, it is failing as spectacularly as HealthCare.gov.
Look at Cameron County, which is about 85% Hispanic. Turnout increased from an average of 4,700 votes in 2011 to 5,100 in 2013.
So in its first real-world test, Texas' voter ID law -- which 66% of Texans support, according to a 2012 University of Texas poll -- had no impact on suppressing the vote. It even can be argued that voter ID helped increase turnout. Turnout was up, and in fact, the 2013 constitutional amendment election saw the highest constitutional amendment election turnout in Texas in about eight years.
...
Here are two more tables from the website for the Texas Secretary of State, showing the number of votes for the first propositions in the last two Texas constitutional amendment elections, in 2011 and 2013. The total votes for other Texas constitutional amendments showed similar increases from the 2011 to 2013 elections, corroborating the numbers quoted above in the CNN article, again, despite the Texas voter identification law (SB 14) having been implemented --
http://elections.sos.state.tx.us/
http://elections.sos.state.tx.us/elchist167_race4186.htm
http://archive.is/yoXPf
http://elections.sos.state.tx.us/elchist158_race3973.htm
http://archive.is/bTCrY
So these numbers make it look like Justice Ginsburg's prediction was wildly wrong — you have to ignore them to argue that the Texas voter identification law will eliminate votes.
And regarding poll taxes, here is an angry comment from one reader of the huffingtonpost.com article quoted above, 'Ginsburg Was Right: Texas' Extreme Voter ID Law is Stopping People From Voting', to another reader who pointed out that Texans can get a birth certificate for $3, to apply for a Texas Election Identification Certificate (Ginsburg also mentioned this in her dissenting opinion, see p.4) —
It doesn't matter HOW much it costs!!! ANY cost is UNCONSTITUTIONAL!!!!!! Get that through your thick skull!!!!!!!!And there was also this reader comment —
People shouldn't have to pay a dime. That $3 is akin to a poll tax, which is ILLEGAL and UNCONSTITUTIONAL in this country...The problem with these statements is that they contain an obvious contradiction — administering the voting process and enforcing voting restrictions is not free, and taxpayers will pay that cost, or elections cannot happen. So if you view charging individual voters with the costs of an election, as collecting a poll tax, then a poll tax is a requirement of voting.
It is true that the 24th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits the payment of a tax as a condition of voting, but how are state governments supposed to enforce any legitimate voting restriction (like the eligibility age restriction allowed by the 26th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution) without administering some process of voter identification that incurs a cost to taxpayers?
The law creates a restriction, and the enforcement of that restriction exacts a cost. We can call a charge to individual voters to obtain identification a poll tax, and then simply charge them in some other way to avoid the issue, but that is a distinction without a difference — taxpayers will pay the costs of enforcing voting restrictions, so the only choice to be made is how that tax will be collected.
Insisting that people should not have to pay to vote is just childish nonsense — obviously, someone must pay, because the process is not free.
Even if we decided to abandon attempts at voter identification, and relied instead on election ink, someone would still be required to pay the cost, however small. And, of course, people have also discovered ways to defeat this simple control, never mind the obvious problem that this method only controls the number of times one can vote, and not whether they are of an eligible age, or are a resident of the locality of a particular election.
The tragedy here is not that any of the people profiled in the articles quoted above were prevented from voting — the tragedy is that they seem to have no understanding that this is the least of their problems, by far. Do two men like Jesus Garcia and Eric Kennie, both over 40 years of age, who struggle to come up with $23 to purchase a birth certificate, really believe that voting will change the quality of their lives?
But even with all the horror stories in the popular media regarding Texas voters being kept from the polls by the new Texas voter identification law, the voter turnout in Texas increased when that law was first implemented — it seems those 'poor minority' Texas voters are not quite as pathetic as many supposedly civic-minded people would like to believe.
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