Iowa Voters

Our Secretary of State still wants to see your ID. Make that a photo ID with an expiration date on it, please, so your Iowa State student ID card will not suffice.

You need it unless you vote absentee, or get someone to swear you are really you, or swear it yourself if you are in a nursing home and can’t vote like other absentee voters. Or unless you have a religious objection or swear you are indigent. In those last two cases we break out the dreaded provisional ballots again.

With that many loopholes his new bill offers way more inconvenience, hassle, confusion, and expense for the state than it offers security for already honest elections.

The Secretary admitted that he knows of no impersonations that could justify this law. He absurdly says the only way to know if they are happening is to video tape voters coming into the polling places. If the Secretary photographed everyone entering the polls, he’d still need a way to identify the photos. Who can claim that these voters were someone else?

He cited the pranksters in New Hampshire this month who recorded themselves lying about who they were in their effort to show they could lie about who they were. They actually were given ballots, but then they ran off without voting. I think they knew it was a crime already.

I wonder how many hours the Secretary spent studying election records to see whether any votes were cast by voters who had died the week before the election. This is the main avenue for voter fraud that might go undetected. It shouldn’t be very hard to study this. The list of who voted is in his possession. Deaths are pretty public, too, along with the date of death.

The Secretary also said the ID card is not a real barrier to voters. He said that in Indiana turnout was higher after the law went into effect than it was before the law. But turnout goes up when population goes up. It also goes up when voters are more interested in the candidates.

Turnout is poor evidence in this debate where only a few voters are going to be affected. Schultz really should hope turnout goes down. That might prove his ID law had deterred fraud. Or it might prove he had disenfranchised people.

Since Schultz can’t prove any actual impersonations, he justified his bill by pointing to close elections. He said even a few impersonations could matter in a close race. But he also admitted a “very limited number of people” would not get to vote under his new rules. Those few voters could also matter in a close race. He has created a problem bigger than the one he is claiming to solve.

Voters don’t know which races will be that close. Elections aren’t stolen by voter impersonators. They are stolen via absentee ballots sometimes. That would certainly be the way to go in Iowa whether this law passes or not.

In fact his bill may not pose much of a barrier. To be denied your ballot, you would have to show up alone and not see anyone in the room who could sign for you. That may happen in the city, but rural Republicans have nothing to fear. What a coincidence.

What Schultz really needs is evidence this impersonation crime has actually happened. Good luck with that. The recent allegation that 953 South Carolina dead voters had cast ballots began to fall apart as soon as a few of the names were checked by the state election department. The rest of the list remains secret and in the hands of the accusing Dept. of Motor Vehicles. Something is rotten in Columbia, S.C. It smells all the way to Des Moines.

The photo above is from the Sandusky (OH) Register.
Hat tip to Radio Iowa’s audio.
cross-posted to Bleeding Heartland, where comments are allowed.

Republicans took a ribbing during Iowa’s recent caucuses because they did not practice what they preach. They did not require their own voters to show a photo ID card before allowing them to vote for a Presidential candidate.

Now some Republican dirty tricksters have tried to make their case for ID cards in a novel way—by committing a crime. They went to New Hampshire polls and got ballots for people who had just died. They filmed themselves doing it(embedded here). This is supposed to prove that ID cards are needed. Actually it proves something else.

Two things, in fact First it proves the crime of impersonating a voter is already well deterred. The tricksters never cast the ballots that were given to them. They merely left the polling place as soon as they had been handed the blank ballot. Even for the sake of their propaganda, they knew better than to carry this crime any farther.

But if it’s not worth the risk even in this case where they were in control of events, how much less is it worth the risk of actually casting just one fraudulent vote into a sea of thousands of legitimate votes? At one polling place the trickster was spotted by a poll worker who recognized he was using the name of a recently deceased man. This inconvenient fact was not included in the propaganda video.

The likelihood of altering the outcome is so tiny that no voters ever take this risk. Voters are smarter than tricksters, as we shall see shortly.

The trick also reveals something else inadvertently–that the crime is so rare no good evidence of it exists. It has to be staged. Ask your friends if they know of any cases. Ask if they have ever gone to vote only to learn they had already been impersonated by a previous voter. Better yet ask our Secretary of State Schultz how many voters ever report to him that they have been stopped from voting for this reason. You won’t find much evidence.

Now that video of this crime has been released, it turns out that merely “obtaining” a ballot in someone else’s name is a crime. It wasn’t necessary to cast the ballot. They may already be guilty.

Why didn’t they stage this trick at the Iowa Republican caucus sites? Because it would have made Republicans look bad. It still does.