"The Carter-Baker ID Card Proposal: Worse Than Georgia"

Spencer Overton has written this Roll Call commentary (paid subscription required). It begins:

In unveiling the Carter-Baker Election Reform Commission’s proposal on voter identification, former President Jimmy Carter condemned Georgia’s recently enacted voter ID law. He labeled the Georgia law — which makes government-issued photo ID an absolute requirement to vote — a discriminatory poll tax that should be “overthrown by the courts.” He tried to distinguish the Carter-Baker ID proposal by asserting that it had adequate safeguards to ensure that legitimate voters would not be excluded.

But the Carter-Baker proposal is more exclusionary than any state ID law — including Georgia’s.

Just under half the states require ID to vote, and most of these states accept a long list of non-photo ID such as a utility bill, bank statement, government check or paycheck. About a dozen of these ID states allow voters without ID to prove their identity by signing an affidavit or reciting information such as birth date and home address.

The Carter-Baker ID proposal would phase out the affidavit safety net and limit the forms of permissible identification to a “Real ID” card. If Georgia adopted the Carter-Baker ID proposal, voters would no longer be able to vote using a U.S. passport, military ID card, student ID card from a Georgia state university, government employee ID card or tribal ID card.

More commentary from Overton on the report is available here.

Posted by Rick Hasen at September 28, 2005 08:29 AM