The Voting News Daily: Voter ID Bill Stymied in Iowa, Federal Bill Coming?
IA: Iowa voter ID plan stymied – Omaha.com
A proposal to require Iowa voters to produce identification at polling places appears unlikely to become law this year. House File 95 went to the Senate State Government Committee after being passed by the House in January. Because it failed to win the panel’s approval by Friday’s deadline for committee action, it’s unlikely the bill will advance any further this year. “It’s dead,” said Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz, who made voter identification a cornerstone of his 2010 election campaign. “Unfortunately, something that is a commonsense issue has somehow become partisan,” the Council Bluffs Republican told The World-Herald. Schultz and other bill supporters have said that requiring voters to show identification is a way to prevent voter fraud. Others said such efforts are a way to reduce voter turnout. County auditors run elections in Iowa, and the Iowa State Association of County Auditors opposed the bill. Read More
With voter ID laws popping up in Republican-controlled statehouses across the country, could a federal bill be far off? According to data from the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, at least 27 state-level voter ID bills — fromAlaska and Arizona to Wisconsin and West Virginia — have been proposed in recent months. “It’s unbelievable, probably half the states in the country have bills in play and more than a dozen are seriously in the pipeline,” Tova Wang of the left-leaning think tank Demos told TPM in an interview. “It’s really unprecedented in terms of geographic scope. I’ve never seen anything like it certainly since I’ve been working on voting rights issues that voter suppression bills would be introduced in so many places at the same time.” “Definitely students are a target here. It’s totally clear to me that you saw in 2008 this unprecedented historic turnout among African-Americans, Latinos and young people — and those happen to be the exact groups of people that are being targeted by these laws to disenfranchise them, and that’s really sad,” Wang said. Wang said the most restrictive bills are in Ohio and Wisconsin, which Wang said require identification issued by the DMV. “Perhaps most interestingly, it doesn’t even include student ID even from schools that are public universities,” she said. Full Article