The saga began five years ago when the Missouri legislature passed a photo ID bill that the Missouri Supreme Court later held to be unconstitutional. Every year since, proponents have introduced the ID proposal in the form of a constitutional amendment in order to avoid future court challenges.
Tomorrow, members of the state House will once again hear the story of the costly and draconian proposal that could affect voting access for more than 230,000 Missourians.
The bills, HJR 14 and HB 329, would tighten the state’s proven effective and extensive voter verification procedure by requiring all voters to present a current, government issued photo identification. The proposal requires the state to provide free state ID for low-income citizens, which is obviously costly for the state. But, more importantly, it’s arduous for the voter. In order to obtain “free” ID, he must prove citizenship, residency, lawful identity, and name change (if applicable) by presenting a myriad of related documents, such as birth certificate, Social Security card, and utility bill. However, a lost or unavailable birth certificate challenges the concept of “free ID” as it costs time and money to obtain, a predicament that may affect 5.7 percent of the population.
Finally, the bill includes an advance voting provision, the same cynical ploy used to defuse opposition last year.
“An ‘advance voting’ program that provides for only a few days of early voting during regular business hours is not much of a gift to voters,” explains Estelle Rogers, Project Vote’s director of advocacy. “If it does anything, it makes voting more convenient for voters who already find it easy to vote. No legislator should be fooled into thinking that this is a reasonable price to pay for a draconian voter ID law.”
And this legislative package has an estimated price tag of $21 million for the first three years of the law’s implementation! In a time of economic crisis and an average unemployment rate of 9.5 percent in the state, advocates question the bill sponsors’ cost-benefit analysis of preventing nonexistent voter impersonation in the state and creating a greater deficit.
“This is unnecessary, expensive and irresponsible,” said Denise Lieberman, Senior Attorney and Missouri Voter Protection Advocate for Advancement Project, at a January 24 hearing of the Senate bills. “We have fair elections in Missouri and both Democrat and Republican secretaries of state have touted the fraud-free nature of our elections under the existing ID laws. In fact, there has never been a single instance of voter impersonation fraud in Missouri — and study after study shows that this kind of fraud simply doesn’t exist.”
The hearings for HJR 14 and HB 329 will take place Tuesday, February 8 at 8:15 a.m. in Hearing Room 5.
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