How much will Voter ID cost?
It seems the Voter ID bill authored by Sen. Troy Fraser (R-Horseshoe Bay) will most likely clear the Senate along party lines of 19-12. While there has been much debate about the bill and the need for it the bill will be headed to the House where the debate should be more contentious and the vote much closer. The House currently has a 76-74 split between the parties so any cross-over will be highly scrutinized by the party leadership. Within the state Texans overwhelmingly support the concept with 69% in favor of having voters present a government-issued ID (source: UT survey). The question now becomes how you pay for it.
Since some elderly and poor Texas voters do not currently have a government-issued ID, unless the lege comes up with a way to pay for providing IDs, the bill creates the equivalent of a poll tax. Sen. Fraser did provide for this in the bill by writing in a provision that no fee is collected if the “person is obtaining the personal identification certificate for the sole purpose of satisfying Section 63.001(b)(1), Election Code.” Currently that’s $15 for persons under 60 and $5 for persons 60 and older.
The bill also has an amendment that requires that the secretary of state and each county’s voter registrar maintain a website stating the requirements for voter identification. Couple with that the requirement that the secretary of state and non-profit organizations selected by the major parties in the state establish efforts to educate the voters of the new requirements. The amendment also states the “secretary of state may use any available funds, including federal funds, for the purposes of this section.” Yes, you read right. Stimulus money can be used to fund the legislation. In fact Sen. Fraser is encouraging the secretary of state to seek these funds to the tune of $2 million. All this for a bill that has “no significant fiscal impact.”
Did I miss something here or has government spending gotten so large that $2 million means “no significant fiscal impact” to Republican senators now? It should also be noted that in the 80th session the bill had a fiscal impact of over $600,000. Somehow in the two years between sessions the process became free. So if you really add the costs up this bill could end up costing the state close to $3 million after implementation, education and issuance of IDs. Yet Sen. Fraser seems to feel that money will just come rolling in from the federal government.
The real issue is whether the costs merit the expected benefits. No solid study has ever been produced that shows significant issues of voter fraud. In fact, some data suggests the number is statistically insignificant to the point that it would have no impact on an election. “The few studies that have been done show fraud to be insignificant to the outcome of elections; it has been measured at levels as low as .0004 percent (PDF) of all ballots cast,” per an article last year in Salon.
What is even more interesting is that while Texas Republicans want to reject stimulus money for unemployment benefits due to possible continued costs without stimulus money they don’t seem to have a problem taking it for a bill that would require continued costs for education and implementation with no economic benefit. Any programs put in to educate voters would have to be continued yearly according to the bill.
Let’s hope this rational thinking invades the House during the debate. Apparently the Republican senators seemed to have lost that ability to rationally debate these issues.
