ABQJOURNAL OPINION/GUEST_COLUMNS: Partisanship Voting's Biggest Threat

Monday, April 11, 2011

Partisanship Voting's Biggest Threat

By Robert Stearns And Paul Stokes
Verified Voting New Mexico; United Voters of New Mexico
          Of all the important election-related proposals that were considered in our latest New Mexico legislative session, one stands out.
        This is the issue of photo voter identification, which generated extreme partisan interest. Photo voter ID was promoted in the election campaigning by our new Republican governor and also by our new Republican secretary of state, who said in legislative hearings that it was the issue most frequently raised by her supporters.
        She also claimed that in the Motor Vehicle Department database she had found 117 cases of noncitizens who were registered to vote. But she did not offer evidence showing whether those people had become naturalized and therefore eligible to vote, or whether the names of those in the MVD database just happened to be the same as those of other individuals in the overall voter registration database.
        New Mexico is not alone in having contentious hearings on this issue.
        Since the successful passage of photo voter ID by Indiana in 2008, numerous states have considered it. Many with Republican-dominated legislatures have succeeded in adopting photo voter ID. Once again, New Mexico stands out for rejecting it.
        Simply put, proponents of photo voter ID claim that illegal voting is a significant problem. But studies show that it's a very rare phenomenon.
        Only a handful of cases have been found across the country in recent elections (see, for example, "The Truth About Voter Fraud" by Justin Levitt, Brennan Center for Justice).
        When you think about it, you can see why. Changing a single vote hardly seems worth the risk of the heavy fine and jail time or of deportation in the case of illegal immigrants.
        Research has also shown that about 10 percent of American citizens, especially those with low incomes, do not have a photo ID. So disenfranchisement is a serious problem.
        It is unfortunate that the constitutional right to vote has become a partisan issue, with Republicans favoring restrictive measures such as photo voter ID, and with Democrats favoring voter identification in other ways that make it easier for eligible voters to vote.
        The heavy lobbying for photo voter ID by our new Republican secretary of state provides an excellent example of why a bureau of elections should be nonpartisan, as they are in several other states.
        In recent years we in New Mexico have made important changes that improved the integrity of our elections. These include a uniform system of voter-marked paper ballots and effective hand-count audits of machine-generated vote tallies.
        Our next change should be the establishment of a nonpartisan New Mexico bureau of elections.

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