Free IDs? The birth certificate copy to get the free ID costs money. Information from the Alabama Department of Public Health says, The fee to search for a birth certificate is $15.00, which includes one certified copy of the birth record or a Certificate of Failure to Find. Additional copies of the same record ordered at the same time are $6.00 each. There is an additional fee of $15.00 to expedite a request. Its also a hassle to obtain one. How many poor and/or older voters who had always voted in the past can jump through the hoops necessary to do what theyd been doing all their lives. Shame on the Alabama GOP for its new voter ID requirement! Bob Nicholson: While they offer little or no credible proof of ID fraud, I believe that they are half right about fraud. Although rare, there is voter fraud going on and people are being convicted - but not from voter impersonation. ID laws dont prevent the type of fraud people are going to jail for, and the proof that conservative writers offer often has nothing to do with voter ID. Thomas Sowell recently wrote on the topic. His support for the existence of voter fraud is an unsubstantiated story of absentee ballots being sent to voters who were then intimidated into handing them over to political operatives. Whether or not this story is true, voter ID laws would not have prevented this type of fraud from occurring. Voters with ID can be intimidated just as easily as those without, and laws are already on the books to address this. Mr. Sowell doesnt want you to notice that this example has nothing to do with voter impersonation. Voters are not being purged from voter rolls by registrars on a timely basis when they move or die. Another study Pew suggests online registration as a partial solution to these inaccurate records, something that saves tax dollars while improving voter roll accuracy. Why did the API leave out vital information from the Pew studies that contradicted the view that fraud was being committed? Conservative web pages tracking voter fraud are also full of fraud allegations. Rare though is an allegation of fraud that would have been prevented by a voter ID law. Rarer still is a conviction for voter impersonation. Conservative myths are also contributing to the call for ID laws. One such myth is ID fraud leaves no evidence. Thus a lack of fraud allegations serves as proof of the need for the law. That twisted logic is simply wrong. All frauds leave some sort of evidence. Voter impersonation evidence would include a false signature, eyewitnesses, and either false voters on the rolls or a potential duplicate voter. Another such myth is that no one has an excuse to not have an ID. Most people do have IDs, but there is a small segment of society that does not drive and are unbanked. Supporters of ID laws point out for these people State voter IDs are free and that if you cant get to your countys registrar office, the state has a mobile ID van that is visiting communities around the state. What they dont mention is that copies of birth certificates to get the free ID are not free and that the mobile ID van visited only 30 locations in the entire state from July 22 though November 1. If you cant get to your registrar and arent lucky enough to have been in one of those 30 locations when the van visited, you are out of luck. Easy and free ID availability just isnt true. Our legislators know that voter ID laws have a disproportionate effect. They know that Alabamas mobile ID van efforts are mere window dressing rather than an effective way of ensuring voter access. They know that there have been few, if any allegations in Alabama of voter impersonation. They know that tax money in Alabama is precious, but they choose to spend it on an unneeded law. And they know that real fraud is occurring because we dont properly maintain our voter rolls in all counties; a problem theyve done nothing about. It makes you wonder why they really passed our voter ID law.
Posted on: Sat, 08 Nov 2014 12:10:22 +0000
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