CHICAGO: Long lines, challenged ballots and two of the closest presidential elections in the country’s history have touched off a landslide of proposed voting law changes across the United States. Some are hailed as much-needed upgrades that will assure everyone of a vote with no fraud; others are alarming civil libertarians who fear new restrictions could disenfranchise the poor and others at society’s margins.
The National Council of State Legislatures, which tracks law-making developments, has compiled a list of sometimes competing proposals that have surfaced this year in 26 states, covering 21 pages of fine print.
Many deal with a central issue — proof of identity for valid voters. But other proposals being debated include stiffer training for poll workers, allowing voters to register on or closer to election day, making it illegal to pay someone to register voters, harsher penalties for voter registration fraud, guidelines for casting provisional ballots and upgrades to election equipment.
The changes generally require approval by both the legislature and governor in any given state.
A new Nebraska law, for instance, allows heavily populated precincts to split in two on election day to eliminate lines.
Voter identification issues have been among the most hotly debated, evidenced recently when the Democratic governor of Wisconsin, Jim Doyle, vetoed a bill that would have required photo identification for all voters — one day after his Republican counterpart in nearby Indiana, Mitch Daniels, signed a photo ID measure into law.
Doyle said the ID requirement would disenfranchise 100,000 people in his state, mainly the elderly who no longer have driving licenses or other photo IDs, many of whom live in nursing homes.
John Gard, speaker of the Republican-controlled Wisconsin Assembly, accused Doyle of “siding with the cheaters and felons” who last year cast at least 12,000 questionable ballots in the state. He vowed to try to override the veto.
Daniels, once President George W. Bush’s budget chief, signed what may be one of the toughest measures yet enacted in the country requiring voters to present photo ID.
It stipulates the ID must be issued by the state of Indiana or the US government. Voters without one must cast a provisional ballot that would be counted only if they return to the local election board by noon of the following Monday and either present additional proof or swear they have some other valid reason, such as poverty, for not having a picture ID.
The Indiana Civil Liberties Union and the state’s Democratic Party are suing in state and federal court respectively to overturn the law.
The debate on voter ID is a clash between some people, many of them conservatives, who believe more restrictions are needed on voting and registration to rein in fraud, and others who think the process needs to be opened up to more voters, according to Miles Rapoport, who as secretary of state for Connecticut from 1995 to 1999 oversaw that state’s election process.
“These competing tendencies were unleashed by the 2000 (presidential) election and encouraged by the Help America Vote Act and propelled further along by the problems in the 2004 election,” said Rapoport who now heads Demos: A Network for Ideas and Action, a policy and advocacy centre.—Reuters
