WaPo covered an excellent report from the Brennan Center finding that new voter photo ID laws unduly burden voters and disproportionately impact "seniors, people of color, people with disabilities, low-income voters, and students."
The study comes on the heels of closing arguments in a trial over Texas’s new law, in which Justice Department lawyers argued that requiring photo IDs from voters would disenfranchise the elderly and minorities.
This is an example of the Obama Justice Department using its power and resources exactly as it should - to protect constitutional rights.
Photo ID laws are a solution in search of a problem, the purported problem being a deluge of election fraud perpetrated by ineligible voters - i.e. illegal immigrants - pretending to be U.S. citizens so they can vote. If such a massive fraud scheme sounds bizarre to you, that's because there is no credible evidence that the problem even exists, much less that it is so widespread that current election fraud laws are inadequate to combat it.
In reality, photo ID laws impair more eligible voters than they stop ineligible voters. From WaPo:
Echoing the Justice Department’s argument that the laws are burdensome, the Brennan Center report found nearly half a million eligible voters in the 10 states do not have access to a vehicle and live more than 10 miles from their nearest state ID-issuing office.
In some areas, the offices that issue IDs maintain limited business hours. Rural areas in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas are served by part-time ID offices. And in an extreme example, the researchers found the office in Sauk City, Wis., is open only on the fifth Wednesday of any month. That would limit the office to being open just four days this year.
My opposition to voter photo ID laws is based on more than the plethora of research indicating that Voter photo ID laws disproportionately impact young, minority, poor, and elderly voters.
In 2008, I served as a volunteer attorney with the Obama campaign’s “Promote the Vote” effort. I witnessed the most appalling actions, whether deliberate or not, to disenfranchise voters that I have ever seen in my 15 years of campaign work.
I was assigned to Precinct 201 in downtown Winchester, Virginia, which I was told by the locals was the “inner city”—clearly a euphemism for a district where the voting population was primarily African American and elderly whites and blacks.
Another attorney and I were the “outside attorneys,” meaning we were assigned outside the polling location. (You must be a qualified voter of the county or city within which the polling place is located in order to receive an “inside the polling place” assignment.). Our job was to help voters coming in and out of the polling location (a school) with any questions or issues they had. When I arrived at 5:30 a.m., there was already a boisterous line of people waiting for the doors to open.
We had been taught in our training to anticipate, and how to resolve, the first major obstacle to arise—Virginia’s identification requirements. In Virginia, a voter must have voted in a federal election in Virginia before, or submit any of a number of forms of identification. If someone is entitled to vote but does not have the proper identification, the voter is allowed to do an “Affirmation of Identity.”
Before people reached the gym to vote, however, they encountered their first roadblock: a table presided over by two Officers of Election, with a prominent sign stating, “Voters must have i.d.” As just explained, this is wrong. The second problem is that, on more than one occasion, when a voter did not have the prescribed identification, the election officers “forgot” to tell them that they could still vote.
And these were the problems I encountered without the vastly more-restrictive photo ID laws described in the Brennan Center's report, which Republicans have also pushed in Virginia where I volunteered in 2008. The Justice Department deserves praise for standing up for individuals' voting rights and challenging Texas' photo ID law. It should keep its resources on cases that protect - not infringe - individual rights.