March 1, 2002
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Should Dogs Vote?
Dogs and dead people don't have a constitutional right to vote, but more of them are going to start turning up at the polls if Senate Democrats, led by New York's Charles Schumer, have their way.
It wasn't supposed to come to this. Following the Florida 2000 debacle both parties were eager to fix the system. The House did its part by passing a bipartisan bill last year. And then in December, after months of negotiations, Senator Christopher Bond (R., Mo.) and Mr. Schumer announced that the Senate, too, had reached a compromise. Their bill, said Mr. Schumer, would allot $3.5 billion for states and localities to upgrade voting systems, improve registration procedures and educate voters about ballots.
No ID needed
It would also target voter fraud, which has been on the increase since the 1993 Motor Voter Law allowed people to register to vote while applying for a driver's license. Unfortunately, some 95% of Motor Voter registrants don't vote, but their names are available for political operatives and others to misuse. A St. Louis dog once registered. The Senate bill requires those who register by mail and are voting for the first time to prove their identity.
Acceptable proof of identity would include photo ID, a utility bill, a bank statement, a government check, a pay check, or any government document showing the name and address of the voter. This is not a requirement that every voter show up at the polls with a photo ID. The measures would apply only to first-time mail-in registrants.
These antifraud measures, which were acceptable to Democrats two months ago, are somehow now unacceptable; Mr. Schumer this week introduced an amendment that strips away the mail-in registrant requirements. And on the Senate floor yesterday he announced that his home state is practically fraud free.
"In New York," said Mr. Schumer, "we have not had -- I checked again yesterday, we called around the state. We called people, not just of one party or another . . . There's been almost no allegation of any kind of fraud with our system." Perhaps he thinks that all of the political cheats in the Northeast live in New Jersey.
Alas, the Senator failed to call one of his hometown newspapers, the New York Post, which reported two years ago in a story headlined "Double-Dippers Sign Up to Vote in N.Y. and Florida" that "New York City [alone] has 11,642 voters with illegal dual registrations." An investigation of voting records in New York and Florida by the Republican National Committee, which the Senator also apparently failed to ring, has turned up 286 names of individuals who double-voted in November 2000.
Mr. Schumer would prefer that states verify voter identities through signature matching. Not only would this be a costly provision -- 34 states currently don't use signature verification and would have to purchase the technology -- but it would also require that the nation's 1.4 million poll workers double as hand-writing experts.
The truth is that Senate Democrats are trying to torpedo a bill they helped write due to pressure from civil rights groups such as the NAACP and La Raza. The activists claim that requiring proof that a voter is a real person is an "undue burden." They expect us to believe that the same ID requirements for, say, renting a video or buying a pack of cigarettes somehow disenfranchise the poor and elderly when it comes to casting a ballot.
Mr. Schumer's amendment passed in a largely partisan preliminary vote Wednesday, but Senate Republicans are planning to filibuster and we'd encourage them to do so. Someone has to make the case that the integrity of the ballot box is just as important to the credibility of elections as the access to it.
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