GOP lawmakers begin push for voter ID

If House Republicans have their way, Iowa voters could soon have to show picture identification at the polls before they are allowed to vote.

State Rep. Renee Schulte (R-Cedar Rapids) revealed at a League of Women Voters forum on Saturday that members of a House subcommittee would be meeting with Republican Secretary of State Matt Schultz on Tuesday to discuss a bill that would require the picture IDs. The statement, however, didn’t come without challenges from the Democratic lawmakers also attending the forum.

“There will be a bill to require a voter ID, and I will be the chair of that bill in the House committee,” Schulte said, adding that the reason Iowa doesn’t have many prosecutions for voter fraud is because “nobody will prosecute” for such crimes.

“The person that is disenfranchised … is not the person who doesn’t have the ID, but the person who walked up and said they were you and then you show up and you can’t vote because somebody already voted as you. That’s the problem.”

But state Sen. Rob Hogg (D-Cedar Rapids) remained skeptical.

“I just wanted to say that I’ve never heard of a case in Iowa where someone was trying to vote and couldn’t because some other voter had already claimed to be them,” Hogg said. “I’ve never heard of that, and I’m kind of a news junkie. Maybe it is out there. If someone has heard of that, I’d really like to know what the details of that were.”

Schulte said the issue would be brought before the Iowa House this session “because that’s how the Secretary of State won his election, on this issue.”

“So that will be started this week,” she said. “There will be a bill coming out of the House that has already been assigned. There is a subcommittee meeting with the Secretary of State on Tuesday to look at the constitutional ways to provide free access to IDs, and then, after Tuesday, it will go to the subcommittee process. So, if you’d like to have comments on that issue, feel free to direct them my way.”

Access to free identification is an integral part of the discussion because, according to state Rep. Todd Taylor (D-Cedar Rapids), the issue is otherwise a poll tax.

“We’ve looked at that in the past, when the majority Democrats were in charge and when we had a Democratic Secretary of State in charge of elections,” Taylor said. “State issued IDs are going to have a cost to them and that cost could be prohibitive. That prohibition could stop somebody from having access to the most basic right in a representative democracy — the power and freedom to vote.”

The checks and balances already in place to verify the identity of voters are enough, argued Linn County Democrats. The idea that there is rampant voter fraud simply isn’t true, said said Sen. Bob Dvorsky (D-Coralville).

“Maybe we should use the word fraud again so that we can, you know, inflame more passions about that. Fraud. Fraud. Fraud. Fraud,” Dvorsky said in a tone of disbelief. “I see the county attorney here, so maybe he can research this, but I know when we had the debate several years ago in the Iowa Senate there was only one case found. One case in 20 years, and that was a college student that had apparently voted in Ames and somewhere else in the state of Iowa. That was it. In 20 years, there was only one case of fraud as I understand it. So, let’s not keep saying, ‘fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud’ when there isn’t any ‘fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud.’”

But, according to Schulte, the reason that there aren’t many criminal cases dealing with voter fraud is because local county attorneys aren’t willing to prosecute.

“There is fraud in voting,” she said. “We don’t have Class D felonies because nobody will prosecute, but that isn’t because there’s not challenges with voting fraud in Iowa.”

Even if House Republicans push through a bill that would require voters to present identification at the polls, Dvorsky said it isn’t likely that Senate Democrats are going to be willing to do the same.

“We are a bicameral legislature,” Dvorsky said. “If the House passes something, that’s well and good. But then it goes to the Senate. I don’t think there is any interest in the Senate in doing that bill.”

The divide between the parties on this single issue, according to Rep. Nate Willems (D-Mount Vernon), is just one more piece of a common theme that Iowans will see emerge repeatedly during the 2012 session.

“Democrats think that voting is a fundamental right that should be easy to do,” Willems noted. “Republicans, with the executive order Gov. [Terry] Branstad signed and the bill that Rep. Schulte is going to push, are trying to create more hoops people who typically happen to be low-income and disproportionately minorities to jump through before they can exercise their right to vote. Once again, this shows one of the fundamental differences between our two parties.”

On his first official day as governor, Branstad chose to rescind an executive order signed in 2005 by former Gov. Tom Vilsack that established a process to give voting rights back to individuals who had committed felonies or aggravated misdemeanors and served their time. Absent that executive order, which has been praised by civil rights leaders in Iowa and throughout the nation, Iowans with criminal convictions will once again be required to petition the governor’s office for restoration of voting rights.

Republicans had previously and unsuccessfully challenged Vilsack’s executive order in court, a fact that has been used by Bob Vander Plaats in his quest to have Branstad sign an executive order banning same-sex marriage in the state.