Not seeing the same picture 
Opinion    Dan Carpenter   Indianapolis Star  March 16, 2005
 
Bill Crawford has been winning elections for 33 years as a state representative, and he says he can't recall an instance where anybody tried to vote as somebody he wasn't.

So why in 2005 is there a bill in the Indiana General Assembly to require a photo ID to vote?

The Republicans, who want it, say it's to protect the integrity of the ballot box.

Crawford, who's a black Democrat, says it's to suppress the black Democratic vote.

"I defy you to find instances where voters are presenting themselves at polling places as someone else," Crawford told The Star's editorial board last week. "There is an inference that in my district, which is in inner-city Indianapolis, we have been historically voting dead people and perpetrating fraud. I've been through 17 elections and I don't see the problem. Why then impose another barrier on the people I represent?"

Republicans say they can't imagine where he gets such an insulting idea.

Crawford and his fellow Democrats say he gets it from Ohio, Florida, Mississippi, Indianapolis and lots of other places where African Americans have a history of facing gauntlets between themselves and the booth.

Nor is it ancient history. Witness the nine-hour waits at inner-city polling places in pivotal Ohio last November. Consider Florida 2000, where a news media analysis found votes were four times more likely to be invalidated in black precincts than in white ones. Remember that the process was overseen in both cases by secretaries of state who doubled as state chairpersons for the Bush campaign.

In Indiana, where voter IDs are a goal of Secretary of State Todd Rokita, who traveled to Florida as a Bush recount commando, there is no doubt among Democrats that "ballot integrity" is a code phrase for vote suppression. Here as elsewhere, there's a Republican tradition of sending volunteer patrols to urban polling places, a tactic blacks don't try to pull in Carmel.

There seems little practical reason for Republicans to have assigned high priority to voter ID, which has passed the full Senate and a House committee on its way to all but certain victory. By and large, electoral problems in Indiana have involved machines, absentee ballots, registration lists and official screwups, not phony voters. If you want vote-buying, look to lobbyists and campaign donors.

Still, fraud's a bad thing, and where's the harm in demanding a little more from everybody to safeguard this sacred act? The neutral answer is that a photo ID probably wouldn't stop a dedicated defrauder. The political answer is that lower-income people don't carry the credentials middle-class people do.

Is it their fault? Should they simply get over their less-than-uniformly-happy experiences with the power structure? Conservatives these days love to label liberals racists for suggesting that poor minorities cannot or should not behave like Republicans; but the facts of the matter are that proper papers can be tough to come by, aren't widely possessed in some neighborhoods and will be a means to a Republican end if raised to the level of election law.

Surprisingly, given the rising brazenness of a GOP that finds its rock and its inspiration in the Deep South, no state yet requires the photo ID for exercising the franchise. Unsurprisingly, those who propose it here act as if they're oblivious to the memories of poll taxes and literacy tests. With apologies to George Santayana, are they doomed to repeat history or eager to?