Editorials

Mend it, don't end it

What to do about the voter ID law

"I would say in 90 percent of these cases, there was no question they were registered voters. It's the ID requirement that prevented them from casting a ballot and being counted."

--Holly Dickson

For the Arkansas ACLU

God bless the American Civil Liberties Union, and God bless 'em all to pieces. Some of us love the ACLU even when we don't agree with it. Because whenever some American's rights are being trampled--or even if there's the remotest possibility that a right might be trampled, or even brushed up against--the ACLU will be there. With lawyers and accompanying briefs, documentation and stop whistle.

Holly Dickson, a lawyer with the ACLU, was quoted in Sunday's paper lamenting the state's new voter ID law. There was no question, she said, that most voters who were rejected at the polls on election day were registered.

Hmmm. It would seem to some of us that if a voter shows up at a polling place in Arkansas without a valid ID, then that automatically calls into question whether he or she should be allowed to cast a ballot. It's the law now. Or as Ms. Dickson might put it, there's no question about that.

But as with most statements out of the ACLU, the lady has a point.

What happened in the last election is indeed unacceptable.

Sunday's front-page news story by our own Claudia Lauer about the number of ballots disqualified in the last election was enough to give those of us who supported the voter ID law pause, or should. It seems that back during the primaries earlier this summer, a total of 1,036 absentee votes were rejected throughout the state because they weren't accompanied by a form of identification or valid copy thereof.

Almost three-quarters of those rejected ballots were for Democratic candidates.

In little Mississippi County in the Delta--which includes wide spots in the road like Gosnell and Buckeye, Etowah and Birdsong--a total of 172 ballots were rejected, 169 for Democratic candidates.

In all the counties that border The River, 444 rejected ballots were Democratic ones. All of 13 were Republican.

The purpose of the law may have been, and may still be, to prevent fraud at the ballot box. But as these latest figures show, the law needs to be tightened up. Now that we know just how voter ID works--or doesn't--legislators need to do some fine tuning, if not more than that. (Claudia Lauer's story told of one election commissioner who almost had to disqualify his wife's ballot--the last ballot she would cast, as it turns out. For she would die shortly thereafter. The injustice of it rankles.)

The Ledge needs to find a way to mend the law so that (1) innocent voters have more time to challenge their ballot's not being counted, and (2) election commissioners and voters are better educated about how the new law works, or is supposed to work.

Here are some suggestions: The Ledge needs to amend the law so that poll workers are required to notify absentee voters when their ballots are disqualified. And give them time to come up with an ID later.

This still new law could be changed to require letters in absentee-ballot envelopes explaining the voter ID law. Some county clerks did as much on their own in the primaries, bless them, too.

There are some fixes that deserve trying before just throwing out the law--whose purpose, lest we forget, is to protect the integrity of the ballot. Why not try fixing the law before overturning it? Only then, if it turns out to be beyond repair, should it be sent to the junk heap. Like any other piece of machinery, laws, too, may benefit by a trial period.

Just because there's a problem enforcing or interpreting a law doesn't necessarily mean it should be repealed. Just because speed limits on the state's highway are widely ignored, as any Arkansas driver can attest, doesn't mean speed limits should be repealed. On the contrary, it may mean the speed limits should be better enforced--and citizens better educated about how to obey them.

It occurs to us, or rather Alert Reader pointed out to us, that there are other requirements for voting in Arkansas--like a valid name and address, and going through the registration process before being allowed to vote. Yet no one objects to any of those now-accepted requirements for casting a legal ballot in this state. They've become routine.

Once upon an earlier time known as the Bad Old Days, machine politicians used to deliver truckloads of sharecroppers to the polls so they could cast their ballots for one or another of the establishment's favorites at the time, whether a Faubus or Fulbright. Let's not go back to that free-and-easy era.

But this still new requirement that a voter present a genuine ID before being allowed to cast his ballot has drawn the ire of the ACLU and Democratic apparatchiki in general. But this new safeguard for the ballot box may also become accepted in time--after it's given a fair trial and the state has a little more experience with it. It may just take some getting used to.

A glitch or two may still need fixing, as with any innovation, but that doesn't mean the whole thing is unfixable--let alone unconstitutional.

Editorial on 07/30/2014

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