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Voter ID bill approved
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 01/25/06
A controversial bill to require that voters show a state-approved photo identification card at the polls won final legislative approval this morning.
The Georgia House, by a vote of 111 to 60, signed off on technical changes made Tuesday to the bill by the state Senate.
The bill, which is expected to be challenged by the ACLU and other groups, now goes to the governor to be signed into law.
GOP leaders introduced the bill, in hopes of appeasing a federal court judge who barred the state from enforcing a similar measure passed last year on grounds that it was tantamount to a poll tax.
The new bill mandates that all 159 county voter registration offices be available to make picture IDs for voters who don’t have a valid driver’s license or state-issued ID card.
State Rep. DuBose Porter of Dublin, the Democratic leader in the House, denounced passage of the bill as unnecessary and an attempt by the GOP “to rig this November’s elections.”.
He said the GOP has not been able to document a single case of fraud involving election-day voting.
“Aren’t we just speaking about a problem that doesn’t exist?” Porter said.
House Speaker Glenn Richardson (R-Hiram) argued that there is a real problem. “There is not a substantiated case because they don’t check for ID, so they don’t know people aren’t showing up with proper ID. That’s why it’s not caught.”
In a short but heated exchange that followed, Porter said Republicans fail to acknowledge that current law requires voters to have one of 17 forms of identification.
Richardson shot back: “And those IDs as you wrote them when you were in charge allowed a sex change court order to be acceptable as ID to vote in the United States of America.
“We found that unacceptable,” he said. “That was listed in the code … an order from the court approving a sex change operation, a utility bill was what you thought was acceptable ID.”
He cut off further discussion of the bill, saying he was exercising his discretion and following his believe that further debate would not change the vote outcome.
