Stricter Voting Laws Carve Latest Partisan Divide

September 26, 2006

By JOYCE PURNICK

MESA, Ariz. — Eva Charlene Steele, a recent transplant from Missouri, has no driver’s license or other form of state identification. So after voting all her adult life, Mrs. Steele will not be voting in November because of an Arizona law that requires proof of citizenship to register.

“I have mixed emotions,” said Mrs. Steele, 57, who uses a wheelchair and lives in a small room in an assisted-living center. “I could see where you would want to keep people who don’t belong in the country from voting, but there has to be an easier way.”

Russell K. Pearce, a leading proponent of the new requirement, offers no apologies.

“You have to show ID for almost everything — to rent a Blockbuster movie!” said Mr. Pearce, a Republican in the State House of Representatives. “Nobody has the right to cancel my vote by voting illegally. This is about political corruption.”

Mrs. Steele and Mr. Pearce are two players in a spreading partisan brawl over new and proposed voting requirements around the country. Republicans say the laws are needed to combat fraud, especially among illegal immigrants. Democrats say there is minimal fraud, if any, and accuse Republicans of suppressing the votes of those least likely to have the required documentation — minorities, the poor and the elderly — who tend to vote for Democrats.

In tight races, Democrats say, the loss of votes could matter in November.

In Maricopa County, Arizona’s largest in population, election officials said that 35 percent of new registrations were rejected for insufficient proof of citizenship last year and that 17 percent had been rejected so far this year. It is not known how many of the rejected registrants were not citizens or were unable to prove their citizenship because they had lost or could not locate birth certificates and other documents.

In Indiana, Daniel J. Parker, chairman of the state Democratic Party, said: “Close to 10 percent of registered voters here do not have driver’s licenses. Who does that impact most? Seniors and minorities.”

A law in Indiana requiring voters to have a state-issued photo ID is being challenged in the federal courts, as are the voting laws in Arizona and in many other states.

Republicans say the Democratic complaints are self-serving.

“Democrats believe they represent stupid people who are not smart enough to vote,” said Randy Pullen, a Republican national committeeman from Arizona who championed a statewide initiative on the new requirements. “I do not.”

The new measures include tighter controls over absentee balloting and stronger registration rules. The most contentious are laws in three states — Georgia, Indiana and Missouri — where people need government-issued picture ID’s to vote, and provisions here in Arizona that tightened voter ID requirements at the polls and imposed the proof-of-citizenship requirement for voter registration.

Several other states are considering similar measures, and the House of Representatives, voting largely along party lines, recently passed a national voter ID measure that is headed for the Senate.

The debate in Washington and the state capitals has been heated, with only one note of agreement: that voting, once burdened by poll taxes and other impediments, is as divisive an issue as ever.

“I have never seen such a sinister plot — I won’t say plot, I’ll say measure — as to target a group of people to try to make it difficult for them to vote,” said Roy E. Barnes, a Democrat and former governor of Georgia who is fighting the new identification law in his state.

Mr. Pearce, the Arizona Republican, said: “We know people are approached to register whether they are illegal or not. We know the left side’s agenda.”

Underlying the debate is the fundamental question of voter fraud and whether people who are not who they say they are — impostors — are voting. Some suggest that the problem is so widespread that the standard methods of proving identification, like a utility bill and a signature, are no longer adequate.

“I know a lot of allegations of voter fraud, especially by noncitizens, that may have been able to tip the balance in favor of one candidate,” said Representative Tom Tancredo, Republican of Colorado and an advocate of tough immigration laws.

The tighter voting rules appeal strongly to people worried about illegal immigration, Mr. Tancredo said.

There is no data, however, to show more than isolated instances of so-called impostor voting by illegal immigrants or others.

Experts in election law say most voter fraud involves absentee balloting, which is unaffected by the new photo identification laws. Few people, they say, will risk a felony charge to vote illegally at the polls, and few illegal immigrants want to interact with government officials — even people running a polling place.

Of Arizona’s 2.7 million registered voters, 238 were believed to have been noncitizens in the last 10 years; only 4 were believed to have voted; and none were impostors, plaintiffs stipulate in their lawsuit to overturn the law, statistics the state has not challenged. Nor is there evidence of impostor voting in Georgia, Indiana or Missouri.

Advocates for the new laws do not dispute the figures — just their relevance.

Thor Hearne, a lawyer for the American Center for Voting Rights, a conservative advocacy group, who was President Bush’s election law counsel in 2004, says there is little proof of impostor voting because few have looked for it.

Todd Rokita, the Indiana secretary of state, agrees. “Critics will say there is no wholesale fraud, and to that I say you don’t understand the nature of election fraud,” said Mr. Rokita, a Republican. “A lot of this goes unreported. Until you have a mechanism in place like photo ID’s, you don’t have anything to report.”

Arizona’s new rules were passed as part of Proposition 200, a referendum that denies certain state and local benefits to illegal immigrants. It got 56 percent of the vote two years ago, after Gov. Janet Napolitano, a Democrat, vetoed a Republican-backed measure passed by the Legislature.

Rooted in the state’s debates over illegal immigration, the measure is the broadest in the country, requiring a driver’s license, a state photo ID or two nonphotographic forms of identification at the polls. Lawyers for the Navajo Nation and other American Indian tribes say the provision particularly discriminates against Indians, many of whom are too poor to drive or are without electricity or telephone bills, alternative forms of identification.

Because the Arizona measures have been in place for less than two years, there is limited documentation of their impact. Lawyers fighting the rules say the measures have prevented thousands of people from registering to vote, particularly in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, a city with many Latino voters.

Supporters of the measures say elections have gone smoothly. Critics point to individual cases, like confusion at the polls in the primary elections earlier this month. They say that people without adequate documentation have been turned away or required to file “conditional provisional” ballots that are counted only if voters follow up — and that not all of them do.

Deborah Lopez, a Democratic political consultant in Phoenix, said that the once simple matter of registering voters at a rally or a fiesta now required labor-intensive door-to-door visits.

It was during a registration drive at her assisted-living center, Desert Palms, that Mrs. Steele learned she could not vote. Disabled, with a son, an Army staff sergeant, on active duty, she left Missouri recently to stay with her brother and subsequently moved into the center.

Lacking a driver’s license, she could get a new state identity card, but she said she had neither the $12 to pay for it nor, because she uses a wheelchair, the transportation to pick it up.

“It makes me a little angry because my son is fighting now in Iraq for others to have the right to vote, and I can’t,” said Mrs. Steele, who submitted an affidavit in the suit against the Arizona law.

Asked if she was a Republican or a Democrat, Mrs. Steele said she was neither: “I vote for the best person for the job.”

Or, she added, she used to.