Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan should send U.S. Rep. Todd Akin, R-Somewhere in West St. Louis County, a thank you note.
The six-term representative just helped Ms. Carnahan make her case against the scourge of voter identification bills like the ones that the Missouri Legislature passed last month. The argument against such proposals is that too many eligible voters — Ms. Carnahan estimates more than 230,000 of them — do not have the requisite up-to-date drivers licenses to properly vote under such laws.
One of them, apparently, is Mr. Akin.
As the Post-Dispatch’s Jake Wagman outlined on Tuesday, Mr. Akin has been voting in Town and Country, where he used to live, even though he’s been living in Wildwood, maybe since 2007. Mr. Akin’s tax records show that he lives in Wildwood. It’s where he parks his car and lets his dog roam in the rolling hills. But that’s not what his drivers license says, and it’s not where he’s been voting.
Mr. Akin, it would seem, makes Ms. Carnahan’s case that a poorly executed voter ID law indeed could disenfranchise voters.
Not so fast, says state Sen. Bill Stouffer, R-Napton, the sponsor of the constitutional amendment that will ask Missouri voters next year to change the constitution to allow a voter ID law. There’s not much to see here, Mr. Stouffer said, when asked about Mr. Akin’s predicament.
“You get busy living life, and you don’t think about changing your registration,” he told Mr. Wagman. “I don’t think there is any fraud intended there. I just think that’s human beings.”
Several such human beings testified before lawmakers this year and in past several years that they, in fact, face serious obstacles to producing a non-expired drivers license when voting. Some of them cannot get a drivers license because they don’t have a birth certificate. Some of them can’t afford one. Others, like disabled people or elderly people, can’t reproduce a signature so that an election judge could verify their identity, as the proposed law would require.
Yes, Mr. Stouffer, “living life” can get in the way.
Full Article: Editorial: Akin makes the case that Voter ID is bad law.