There has been much discussion in New York since that state’s primary earlier this month about reports that voting machines there failed to record hundreds of votes cast for Barack Obama. We have editorialized many times in the past about the need for ballots to be recorded on paper, not just electronically, in all elections. We now note, though, that the Supreme Court is considering a case that raises a closely related issue – the potential for fraudulent votes to be cast and counted. In that case, some Indiana residents are challenging a state law requiring that people show photo IDs in order to vote. The law, the facts, common sense and basic fairness all argue in favor of the state law, and against its challengers.
Those who challenge the law cite 34 Indianapolis residents (out of 165,000 who voted) who were not allowed to cast ballots in last November’s mayoral race because they could not produce proper identification. But all 34, by state law, were afforded the chance to cast provisional ballots that would be counted if they could show a clerk proof of their identities within 10 days. Only two chose to bother doing so – and their votes were indeed counted. In short, nobody was disenfranchised by the law. The U.S. Constitution leaves it up to states to set the “times, places and manner” of holding elections, and Supreme Court precedent has affirmed that states can promulgate reasonable regulations to ensure the integrity of elections. It only makes sense to think that a simple photo ID requirement, the same as is required for airplane travel, would fall well within those regulatory parameters.
The need for some sort of safeguards should by now be abundantly clear. Very few national elections go by without well documented evidence of voting shenanigans. Time after time, investigators even find proof that people have voted in the name of their pets, and in Milwaukee in the presidential election of 2004 more than 200 felons voted illegally as well. Also – get this! – in the 1990s, “60 Minutes” discovered that the illegal alien who assassinated Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was registered to vote in San Pedro, Calif., *twice.* For all those reasons, the Supreme Court ought to uphold the Indiana law, and make every honest citizen’s vote count by letting states ensure that they count only honest ballots.
