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Friday, September 7, 2007
The picture is still clear, simple: Voters need IDs
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Georgians possessed of common sense are scratching their heads today in utter amazement that it took so long for sanity to prevail on the requirement that potential voters establish their identities at the polls.
The decision Thursday by U.S. District Court Judge Harold Murphy of Rome brings “closure” to one of the goofiest legal tantrums witnessed since the no-underlying-crime Scooter Libby case. In the voter ID case, complaining organizations scoured the state, searching high and low from the tidewaters of Glenn to the outskirts of Chattanooga, for a single victim aggrieved by the requirement to produce valid photo identification. A single victim. One. One from among 5,079,588 registered voters in Georgia. They could not.
“Although plaintiffs claim to know of people who claim that they lack photo ID, plaintiffs have failed to identify those individuals,” wrote Murphy in his order upholding the law. “The failure to identify those individuals ‘is particularly acute’ in light of plaintiffs’ contention that a large number of Georgia voters lack acceptable photo ID.”
Had they existed, surely the League of Women Voters of Georgia, Common Cause, the NAACP and the organizations of black elected officials and clergy could have produced one in two years of searching. And they didn’t. Oh, they’ll continue to try and will eventually produce a “victim,” but search as they did, it’s telling that despite the hype and rhetoric and the predictions of doom, the facts in evidence amounted to nothing. No harm. No foul.
There are two lessons here. One is that voter ID was never so much about establishing identification at the polls as it was about the shift in power under the Gold Dome. Democratic activists and their media allies kept insisting that Republicans had some sinister motive and that the real problem the Legislature should be addressing was absentee ballot fraud.
Quoting from an Indiana case where the League of Women Voters had also challenged voter identification law, unsuccessfully, Murphy noted that “the legislature has wide latitude in determining the problems it wishes to address and the manner in which it desires to address them.”
The Legislature is free — hallelujah the acknowledgment — to assess voter fraud and attack it in whatever order it sees fit, “addressing itself to the phase of the problem which seems most acute to the legislative mind,” a quote from an 8-0 decision by the Earl Warren court in 1955. “The legislature may select one phase of one field and apply a remedy there, neglecting others.”
That’s the heart of the matter and the key to understanding the bloviated complaints that have been bandied about for the past two years.
The plain fact is that power shifted, and the heel-diggers refused to acknowledge that the likes of state Sen. Cecil Staton (R-Macon) and state Rep. Barry Fleming (R-Harlem) were driving the train on voter fraud, not the old crew. That’s painful for some partisan interest groups to acknowledge and they sought, unsuccessfully, to use state and federal courts to roll back the clock.
Murphy wisely deferred, finding as well that “the photo ID requirement is rationally related” to the state’s interest in further preventing fraudulent voting.
For the state, it was a blow-out. Secretary of State Karen Handel has gone to great lengths to inform potential voters of the photo ID requirement, sending out 250,000 letters, buying hundreds of radio spots, setting up a hotline and Web site, and training election officials and poll workers in the 23 counties with elections on Sept. 18. “We don’t ever want to be in a place where a citizen who is legitimately eligible to cast a vote is not able to do it,” she said. Photo IDs are free and readily available in every county.
Comes now the second lesson of this protracted and overblown political snit. The lesson is that any change conservatives or Republicans might bring requires a legislative strategy, a public relations strategy, and a team of skilled and dedicated lawyers determined to fight in the Legislature, in the media and in the courts.
Accused of using photo ID as a subterfuge to keep blacks from voting, a baseless and absurd allegation — it would have been easy to back down and to abandon efforts to write a voter ID law — state leaders stuck by their beliefs.
And now they have won on all counts.
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