First, a personal account. When I voted in the August primary I not only had to show my driver’s license to an election clerk I had known personally for about 30 years, I also had to sign a statement swearing that I was, indeed, a citizen and eligible to vote. I rolled my eyes, but didn’t complain. She was only following instructions.
But the oath-signing was onerous. The requirement assumes that at least some of us who come to do their civic duty are cheating. That is an insult. Kansas should put an end to that part of the protocol.
Now to the bigger picture. Several states have passed legislation its authors say is designed to root out illegal voters. In every case, the authors were Republicans and it took Republican majorities to put the laws on the books. With the presidential election drawing nigh, officials are now using those laws to weed the illegals from voter registration rolls.
They are finding that the laws are solutions for problems that don’t exist.
Searches in Colorado and Florida have discovered that less than one-tenth of 1 percent of all registered voters in either state are ineligible to vote for one reason or another.
Colorado and Florida are both swing states. An examination of the states which adopted punitive election qualification laws shows most are toss-ups in the upcoming election.
In each, state election officials sent letters to those they suspected might be ineligible to vote asking they demonstrate their eligibility to registration officials. All but a handful of those notified proved their eligibility.
But in the process, many of those questioned were deeply offended. One can expect them to vote Democratic as a reaction to the Republican offensive. The effort, in other words, is likely to backfire.
Colorado, for example, questioned 3,903 registered voters. Of those, only 141 had a questionable status — or .004 percent of the state’s nearly 3.5 million voters. And the 141 are dwindling. A person-by-person check done by the Denver clerk and recorder’s office looked at eight of them and found all eight eligible to vote. One other said he had never voted and still another is an immigrant from Canada who is now a U.S. citizen and has moved from Denver.
In Florida, the state began questioning 180,000 registered voters. That number was quickly reduced to 2,600. In the end, only 207 weren’t citizens. Florida has 11.4 million registered voters. The illegals amount to .001 percent of the total.
A search in North Carolina, another battleground state, discovered only 12 instances in which a noncitizen had voted. The state has 6.4 million voters.
Last week, Iowa’s Division of Criminal Investigation filed election misconduct charges against three noncitizens who voted in gubernatorial and city elections in 2010 and 2011. Among the three are Canadians who thought they were barred from voting only in presidential elections.
KANSAS SECRETARY of State Kris Kobach is a national leader in the effort to make voting more difficult by complicating the registration process and requiring identification papers that some do not have and find difficult to obtain. It is not a coincidence that many of those who don’t have a passport or a driver’s license are likely to vote Democratic.
While Kobach doesn’t make the argument out loud, his crusade has the effect of helping Republican candidates. As was previously noted, ALL of the initiatives to tighten election laws have been Republican initiatives. They have the effect of reducing the number of citizens who can qualify to vote who are poor, disabled or have become citizens recently.
As was mentioned at the beginning, the stringent identification procedures put into place also cast a dark shadow of suspicion over the election process.
Kris Kobach lives in a separate world populated by liars and cheats. Most of the rest of us assume that the guy or gal in the next voting booth is just like we are — an ordinary citizen who votes because that’s what good citizens do.
