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The Wikipedia def­i­n­i­tion is as good a place as any to start:

Voter sup­pres­sion is a strat­egy to influ­ence the out­come of an elec­tion by dis­cour­ag­ing or pre­vent­ing peo­ple from exer­cis­ing their right to vote. It is dis­tin­guished from polit­i­cal cam­paign­ing in that cam­paign­ing attempts to change likely vot­ing behav­ior by chang­ing the opin­ions of poten­tial vot­ers through per­sua­sion and orga­ni­za­tion. Voter sup­pres­sion instead attempts to reduce the num­ber of vot­ers who might vote against the can­di­date or propo­si­tion advo­cated by the suppressors.

In the short time since the 2010 elec­tions, in state after state with Repub­li­can leg­is­la­tures and Repub­li­can gov­er­nors, under the guise of pre­vent­ing vote fraud, laws have been intro­duced which will, unques­tion­ably, have the effect of low­er­ing voter turnout. The spe­cific groups of vot­ers who are most likely to be affected tend to vote Democratic.

Is this sim­ply coincidental?

The num­ber of laws that have been intro­duced, and the scale of their effects, are too great to cover in a sin­gle arti­cle. One recent study described the efforts in Wis­con­sin, Ohio, North Car­olina, Maine, Florida, and Texas.

In most of these cases, the change in the law would require a state-​​issued iden­ti­fi­ca­tion card, such as a driver’s license, to be pre­sented at a polling place as val­i­da­tion of iden­tity. One might see this as a triv­ial bur­den on vot­ers, but it is some­thing that will hit hard on peo­ple who don’t drive (most usu­ally elderly, under-​​21, poor peo­ple, or inner-​​city res­i­dents who take pub­lic trans­porta­tion), or col­lege stu­dents who usu­ally rely on the driver’s license from their home state or from a dif­fer­ent loca­tion (hence with a dif­fer­ent address) in the same state. Inter­est­ingly, these are the same demo­graph­ics who are more likely to vote for Democrats.

Romanian ID card N = Number (0 - 9) X = Letter...

Roman­ian ID card

In Wis­con­sin, the Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tion pro­posed clos­ing driver’s license offices in pre­dom­i­nantly Demo­c­ra­tic areas, and extend­ing the hours and open­ing addi­tional offices in pre­dom­i­nantly Repub­li­can areas. It’s hard to see how these actions can be related to address­ing vote fraud.

One could argue that the risk of increased dis­en­fran­chise­ment of vot­ers could be excused or jus­ti­fied if there was wide­spread evi­dence of vote fraud, or if some recent close elec­tions had been affected by vote fraud. There is no such evi­dence for any­thing like that in the recent his­tory of the United States.

Even if the infa­mous ACORN accu­sa­tions had some basis, what they amounted to was not voter fraud, but rather voter reg­is­tra­tion fraud, and the vic­tim there was ACORN, not the elec­tion sys­tem. No one actu­ally attempted to vote under the name of “Mickey Mouse” or any of the other fake reg­is­tra­tions, so there was no vote fraud. The fake reg­is­tra­tions were dis­cov­ered and reported by ACORN itself, which one would not expect if ACORN had been try­ing to com­mit a fraud. And the only crime which actu­ally occurred was that ACORN had been defrauded of the wages they had paid to the peo­ple who pro­vided faked reg­is­tra­tion for pay.

These new voter iden­ti­fi­ca­tion cards, and the argu­ments about “pre­vent­ing vote fraud,” are a solu­tion look­ing for a prob­lem. Since there is no vote fraud prob­lem for this solu­tion to address, its true pur­pose must be some­thing else.

Is it coin­ci­dence that the vot­ers who will pri­mar­ily be incon­ve­nienced, or even turned away from the polls, tend to vote Demo­c­ra­tic, and that the states push­ing these new require­ments have Republican-​​controlled state governments?

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