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Voter Photo ID Laws Have Harsh
Impact on Poor, Elderly and Minority
Voters, Study Says
By
Khalil Abdullah, New America Media
July 21, 2012
If no one provides him
with a ride, Jose Zuniga, 83-years old and
wheelchair-bound, would have to take two or
three buses and travel 20 miles to reach the
nearest south Texas government office that
could issue the new photo ID he will need to
vote in upcoming elections.
Zuniga is one of a particular sub-set of an
estimated 500,000 eligible voters in 10
states who could be negatively affected by
stricter photo ID laws. They do not own a
car nor do they drive. They live more than
10 miles away from a state office that can
issue the ID required to vote and that would
be considered a fulltime facility, that is,
one that is open more than two days a week.
In Texas alone, close to 13 percent, or
nearly two million, of the state’s
voting–age citizens live more than 10 miles
from the nearest state office that can issue
a voter ID.
Texas is one of 10 states examined in The
Challenge of Obtaining Voter Identification,
a newly released study by the Brennan Center
for Justice. The states, selected because of
their more restrictive legislation for
government-issued photo ID requirements, are
Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas,
Mississippi, Pennsylvania, South Carolina,
Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin.
“For this study, we wanted to look at how
difficult it would be for those estimated
three to four million voters in the affected
states to obtain voter ID,” said Keesha
Gaskins, senior counsel at the Brennan
Center and the study’s co-author. “What we
found really undercuts the claim by many
proponents of these laws that eligible
voters can easily obtain an ID to vote.”
In some instances, the states’ data
corroborate the study’s findings. The study
does not speculate about the political
intention of the supporters for more
restrictive ID laws, though partisan
opponents of the laws note that, with few
exceptions, the legislatures that enacted
them have been Republican controlled.
Rather, it graphically shows how poverty,
states’ persistent underinvestment in public
transportation -- especially in rural areas
-- and bureaucratic inefficiencies among
different agencies, combine to pose daunting
challenges for many Americans to obtain
documentation required to vote in states
where the laws have been proposed or allowed
to stand.
In Wisconsin, one town’s government
ID-issuing office is only open on the fifth
Wednesday of the month. Admittedly, the
town’s population is under 5,000, but the
fifth-Wednesday rule results in the office
being open only four times during 2012. With
February and May behind us, it will open
again on Wednesday, August 29, but not in
September. If you miss August, wait until
October 31.
“In other states,” the study noted,
“Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas —
many part-time ID-issuing offices are in the
rural regions with the highest
concentrations of people of color and people
in poverty.”
There are stark examples of how limited
hours could affect working, eligible voters
who need a new photo ID. “In South Carolina,
only six of the state’s 68 ID offices are
open on Saturday. No state ID-issuing
offices are open on Saturdays in Alabama,
Kansas, Mississippi, Texas and Wisconsin.
All ID-issuing offices in restrictive voter
ID states are closed on Sunday,” the study
notes.
The study also shows just how potentially
pernicious structural barriers can be, and
not just for rural populations. In Rock
Hill, S.C., according to the study, “the
city’s largest concentration of eligible
black voters — nearly 42,000 of them — live
in the city center. Yet the city’s one
ID-issuing office is located seven miles
outside the city center. The city has no
regularly scheduled public transportation;
the only available public transportation to
an ID office requires 48 hours notice for a
scheduled pick up.”
The study cites 32 counties in Texas near
the Mexican border with only two photo
ID-issuing offices among them. Over 80,000
voting-eligible Latino voters reside in
those counties.
In state after state, the study shows that
the disproportionate, collective impact of
limited offices or office hours for
ID-issuing agencies and lack of public
transportation falls on African-American and
Latino populations.
Similarly, because of the higher
concentration of poverty among those same
constituencies, the out-of-pocket costs to
obtain photo IDs can be problematic. Even
where states issue a “free” photo ID, there
are costs incurred to obtain the
documentation necessary to obtain one.
Congresswoman Gwenn Moore, D-Wis., who
opposes her state’s photo-ID laws, said she
knows of constituents who have spent
hundreds of dollars in their quest to obtain
a voter ID.
Where cost is not an issue, bureaucratic
hurdles can still be vexing. The study gave
the example of an eligible voter caught in a
Mississippi Catch-22: in order to get a
government-issued photo ID to vote, one must
present a birth certificate, but a photo ID
is required by the state before a birth
certificate can be issued.
Sundeep Iyer, the Brennan Center’s principal
quantitative analyst and co-author of the
study, said researchers’ conversations with
Americans around the country seem to
indicate that people generally think voter
ID laws are a good thing, but they also feel
an ID shouldn’t be made too difficult to
get. And that is precisely the point that
the study reveals. “The difficulty of
obtaining ID is part and parcel of what a
voter ID law is about,” Iyer said. “You
can’t divorce the voter ID law itself from
the difficulty of obtaining voter ID.” The
negative effect on individuals and
populations “speaks very strongly against
the merits of these laws,” he noted.
The status of voter ID laws varies among the
10 states surveyed. Alabama’s law will not
be in effect in time for this year’s
election and the federal court ruling on the
Texas law, which was opposed by the
Department of Justice, won’t be announced
until the end of August. Similarly, South
Carolina and Mississippi laws are pending
federal approval. Photo ID laws are
currently in effect in Georgia, Indiana,
Kansas, Pennsylvania and Tennessee.
Pennsylvania’s law is also being challenged
in a lawsuit, and Wisconsin’s proposed laws
are still tied up in state court.
Lawrence Norden, deputy director of the
Democracy Program at the Brennan Center,
cast the issue of voter ID laws in moral
terms. He noted that Jose Zuniga had voted
for decades under Texas’s prior ID laws and
that there are thousands of Americans like
him who will now have to struggle to
exercise their right to vote.
The initiative behind the photo ID laws,
Norden observed, “betrays the idea that, in
the United States, we ensure that all people
have equal access to the franchise.”
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