If it ain’t broke . . .

Republicans disenfranchised only about 75 voters in the special Senate election in Jonesboro two weeks ago.

The disenfranchisement was inconsequential … except perhaps to those disenfranchised, who may or may not be aware of it.

This special election provided a small early test of the state’s new voter-identification law. Passed last year over Gov. Mike Beebe’s veto, the law provides that you are not an American citizen with voting rights unless you produce a picture for presentation to a democracy gatekeeper.

The GOP candidate won the race by more than a thousand votes and didn’t need the disenfranchisements.

You call that insurance.

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In the macro sense, Republicans have Barack Obama and his “Kenyan socialism” to produce big victories in Arkansas.

But if something should somehow get real close, then Republicans have the protection in the micro sense of this voter-ID requirement.

The insurance policy would seem, by design, to impair old folks and poor folks-more usually Democratic voters-who either don’t have driver’s licenses or the wherewithal to get alternative credentials now being offered.

Actually, the results of the law’s maiden application were mixed.

The new law apparently worked splendidly in on-site early voting or at the polls on the day of the election. No one, so far as anyone has said, got turned away or was required to cast only a provisional battle on account of being unable to produce a photo.

But about 75 absentee ballots got thrown out because those casting them by mail did not enclose any identification-either an official photo or a copy of a utility bill or other invoice matching the address, a requirement the ballots instructed so subtly that it was easy to miss.

Nor did those persons come in by the Monday after the election-well, Tuesday, since that Monday was a holiday-to prove their existence, a permission extended although it strictly applies in the statute only to contested provisional ballots cast in person.

If you’re out of the country on Election Day, you might not necessarily be back by the next week to show up at the courthouse and prove yourself.

Thus we can identify these problems:

1. Absentee ballots need clarity and greater prominence for the requirement of an ID enclosure.

2. The post-election verification permission for polling-place provisional ballots needs to be formally applied to absentee ballots so that there will be an actual legal basis to invite absentee voters to come in and prove themselves.

The state Board of Election Commissioners said there was no such authority for absentee voters. But Secretary of State Mark Martin’s office advised Craighead County to extend that permission anyway. We can only wonder what Mark, a fiery Republican partisan, might have said if the 75 votes had mattered.

1. Seventy-five votes could indeed matter sometime and somewhere. Think of the dust-up if the Jonesboro race had been so close as to be within 75 votes. We don’t want to risk having control of the state House of Representatives come down in November to a recount somewhere in which 75 voters are being disenfranchised.

Well, some of us don’t.

Actually, there’s one other more general problem: A photo identification for a live voter at the polling place is verifiable by comparing the photo to the person who is standing there, though, as it happens, my driver’s license photo appears to be of someone else-a scruffy, unkempt, unpleasant person, perhaps Nick Nolte after a DWI arrest.

But there’s no way an election official can look upon an absentee ballot and the accompanying photo and know for certain that the absentee voter and the subject of the mugshot are indeed the same person.

Consider the word: Absentee.

I think I’ll vote absentee in November and enclose a police mugshot of Nick Nolte and see if I get counted.

Here’s the kicker: Polling-place fraud is highly uncommon. And the most recent absentee-voting disgrace in the state had to do not with matters of identification, but with people plying voters with bottles of vodka in exchange for filling out an absentee ballot the way the vodka-supplier wanted.

Think about it: A man who takes a fifth of vodka and fills out an absentee ballot as instructed could well possess a driver’s license for the vote-buyer to copy.

We are fixing something unbroken with something that itself is broken.

That’s unless a little disenfranchisement is your point.

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.