Over two long days, the House Elections Committee heard both invited and public testimony about Senate Bill 362, Sen. Troy Fraser’s bill to require voters to prove their identity at the polls beyond simply showing a voter registration certificate. If you’ve followed the voter ID saga thus far, the testimony that we caught won’t surprise you: Conservatives such as The Wall Street Journal‘s John Fund, author of Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy, insisted that such a requirement was essential to protecting our elections; liberals such as Justin Levitt of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law claimed that people commit voter impersonation (the only type of fraud that voter ID would prevent) less often than they get struck by lightning. No vote on the bill was taken; sources tell us that if it is sent to the House floor, it won’t happen until next week. For more, go to austinchronicle.com/legeland.
This article appears in April 10 • 2009.