As states around the country enact or consider voter-ID laws, the battle formations are well-rehearsed. Conservatives who back the laws say that there’s a danger of fraudulent votes, which pollute the democratic process at best and swing elections at worst. Liberals who oppose them counter that there’s next to no evidence of actual voting fraud; that voter-ID laws wouldn’t stop that fraud anyway; and that the laws are actually intended to depress voter-turnout among the populations that are least likely to hold state-issued photo ID—students, the poor, minorities, and the elderly who are most likely to vote Democratic—and improve conservative prospects in elections, despite demographic changes that favor liberal candidates. The pro-voter-ID side has two big problems. First, they’ve been unable to produce proof of the widespread voter fraud they believe exists. Second, people who agree with them—and in some cases the proponents themselves—keep slipping up and saying the point is to help conservative candidates. Last week, Jim DeMint, the president of the Heritage Foundation and former senator from South Carolina, spoke on St. Louis-area talk radio. Legislators in Missouri are trying to place a constitutional amendment on the ballot that would mandate that voters show voter ID. (I explained why they’re using that path last week.) Host Jamie Allman asked DeMint about Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe’s move to re-enfranchise former felons.
“The left is trying to draw votes from illegals, from voter fraud, a lot of different things, so this kind of fits right in to trying to find another group that they can basically count on to vote their way,” DeMint said. “So it’s really a bigger issue, and that’s why the left fights voter ID or any kind of picture ID to know that it is actually a registered voter who’s voting. And so it’s something we’re working on all over the country, because in the states where they do have voter-ID laws you’ve seen, actually, elections begin to change towards more conservative candidates.”
It’s that last part that progressives have seized on—DeMint’s statement that “in the states where they do have voter ID laws you’ve seen … elections begin to change towards more conservative candidates.” It suggests that the motivation is just what voter-ID opponents have suggested all along.
The rest of DeMint’s comment, though, is equally interesting. It offers a litany of ways he thinks Democrats are trying to steal elections—and frames voter-ID laws as one tactic to fight back. But his examples don’t really hold up. It’s unclear what effect McAuliffe’s move might have in 2016, and Nate Cohn at The Upshot suggests it might be relatively modest. Incarceration rates are widely racially disparate, so that more ex-cons are African Americans, and African Americans tend to vote heavily Democratic. Over the years, the push for felon re-enfranchisement has come from both sides of the aisle—former Senator Rick Santorum backed it during his 2012 presidential run—but Democrats have been especially eager to implement the reform. Some conservatives have been warning for more than a decade that felon re-enfranchisement is a Democratic ploy to win votes, and while it’s hard to imagine there’s no partisan motive involved, that’s not a compelling argument for excluding people from the body politic. DeMint’s comment about “illegals” is probably a reference to the idea that Democrats want to offer citizenship to illegal citizens to win their votes; the fraud question is, again, barely a question.
Full Article: Are Voter-ID Laws Really Intended to Help Elect Conservatives? Jim DeMint Says Yes – The Atlantic.