Philzone.org - Philzone Phansite Community Discussion Board: Politics: Politics - Archive 2012: Voter I.D. Laws and the 24th Amendment

I don't know the answer here, but it's an interesting topic for discussion. If you're required to have a state issued identification, and that identification isn't free...well, could that cost be considered a tax?

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.

Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

^^Text of the 24th...might come down the the same discussion regarding the individual mandate. Fee? Fine? Tax?

I think there could be an argument that a required payment to get a government-issued identification is a tax. Like many taxes, you are not compelled to consume what is being taxed, but if you do, you pay the tax (sales tax comes to mind).

Thoughts?

and that identification isn't free...well, could that cost be considered a tax? >>

if the IDs are issued for free..
what then?

then it couldn't be considered a tax

Naturally.

Bert with the tough questions.

what kind of ID is needed when applying for unemployment (or any govt program)? welfare? admission to college? i really don't get the opposition to this voter ID thing as most people either already have the required ID or they falsified paperwork to get what they wanted.

people are required to show photo id just to pay their bill where i work. how the hell can asking for photo ID to vote be wrong?

>>>you are not compelled to consume what is being taxed

except for health insurance when ocare kicks in.

I'm making the constitutional argument, Hillman (or bringing up its possibility). If what you pay for a govt. issued I.D. is a tax, then voter I.D. laws are unconstitutional.

>>>>>>what kind of ID is needed when applying for unemployment (or any govt program)? welfare? admission to college?



a social security number


>>>>people are required to show photo id just to pay their bill where i work.


Where do you work?

Does it have to be govt.-issued? In any case...irrelevant. Nothing about paying bills or cashing checks in the constitution.

photo ID was required for application to college, not just the SSN.

issue a photo ID without any cost if it's that big a deal. most states that are raising the voter id issue issue have plans to do just that.

as an aside on constitutionality, is it constitutional to tax white people for tanning bed use? i don't see blacks, latinos, asians, or any other race going into those salons. it appears to be a race based tax.

i work for a media/communications industrial complex.

>>>i work for a media/communications industrial complex.


so nowhere that has any relevance to the topic being discussed here.

got it.


>>>>photo ID was required for application to college, not just the SSN.

You don't need to show a photo ID to apply at most colleges.

I'm not gonna say all but pretty sure you can apply online for almost any college without showing anybody an ID.

>>>so nowhere that has any relevance to the topic being discussed here.

yeah, requiring an ID to do something has no relevance to this at all. absolutely no relevance in a thread with "Voter ID" in the title.

you can apply online all you want, but actually go there to sign the paperwork, apply for student loans, etc & see how far you get without a photo id. it was like that in WA, OR, NC, VA, & here in TN. i know CA is different, they may just take you at your word. they probably do the way the state is run.

---

quote:

By Chancellor (Grievous_angel) on Saturday, February 04, 2012 - 02:50 pm: Edit Post

Does it have to be govt.-issued? In any case...irrelevant. Nothing about paying bills or cashing checks in the constitution.

---

if the IDs are issued for free.. >>

its a non issue

states have already offered the IDs for free..
and if required by law all IDs issued for the purpose of voting will be free..

wow, a quote from chance.

i'm impressed.

you know how to use the quote function.

wow.

well I know you don't respect my opinion at all but you do with Chance so I just figured I point out I'm not the only one who thinks your business practices are irrelevant to the question he posed when he started this thread.

i do respect your opinion when you're not just being a dickhead.

and.......


examples of where and how ID's are required are germane in my opinion since that's really the heart of the matter - this is one of the proverbial dead horse issues here. somehow asking for an ID to vote is "disenfranchising" some group. if one wants to couch the argument as a tax constitutionality issue, fine. it's still about requiring an id (whether there's any money/fees/taxes involved or not) be shown in exchange for a service, product, or other function.

then let's use the very same logic on ocare & the "not a tax" penalty issue and its constitutionality.

Bert is right in the case of Wisconsin. If you need a State I.D. for voting, it's free. However, you can not hold one of those simultaneous with a Driver's License. Therefore, if you want to drive and vote, you have to pay.

http://www.dot.wisconsin.gov/drivers/drivers/apply /idcard.htm

FREE Wisconsin ID cards for voting
ID cards used for voting are FREE. If you are a U.S. citizen, will be at least 18 years of age by the next election, and require a Wisconsin ID card to vote, please check the ID for FREE box when completing the MV3004 (405 KB) - Wisconsin Identification Card (ID) Application or when applying online. Otherwise, please pay the required fee. DMV service centers accept cash or checks only.

A free ID card is NOT available under the following circumstances:

If you currently have a valid, unexpired driver license (DL), you are not eligible under Wisconsin law to obtain an ID.
If you will not be at least 18 years of age on the date of the next election.
If you are not eligible to vote in Wisconsin.


Don't know about all other states.

Hillman, I think you're wrong. The constitution specifies that you can not be prevented from voting for failure to pay any tax. Therefore, if it costs you money, paid to the state, to get an I.D. to vote, there may very well be a constitutional issue here.

Constitutional law has been trending toward making voting both easier and more widely available since the Founders wrote it (they didn't want hardly anyone voting). In the absence of anything even approaching a voter fraud problem, I'm disinclined to support reversing that trend.

Me too. We should reverse that trend.

>>>you can not hold one of those simultaneous with a Driver's License.

why would you need one if you have a drivers license?

>>>Therefore, if it costs you money, paid to the state, to get an I.D. to vote, there may very well be a constitutional issue here.

that's OK to disagree, but paying to get a drivers license as an "offically recognized" form of govt issued ID is not a fine. the money paid is for the driving privilege part, not paying for a "right to vote". that's an incidental included by having the govt issued photo id for driving.


>>>you can not hold one of those simultaneous with a Driver's License.

as bubby said, there's no need to hold both. if you let your driver license expire, that's your problem, not the state's. once you renew your license you're good to go.

Fair enough. I don't know the regulations in the rest of the states, but if they're all offering free I.D. for voting, the 24th amendment doesn't apply.

I still think that voter I.D. laws are an example of a solution without a problem. There's just no point. In the absence of a statistically significant problem with voting fraud, why make voting even a little bit more difficult?

It just defies logic that the same people that constantly invoke the founding principles are for this. Actually, I guess it doesn't...as I said above, the founding fathers didn't want hardly anyone voting.

Jack Kelly
Voter fraud is real
And voter ID laws are really needed; they are not racist
Sunday, December 18, 2011
By Jack Kelly, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The state chairman of Indiana's Democratic Party resigned Monday as a probe of election fraud in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary widened.

State law requires a presidential candidate to gather 500 valid signatures in each county to qualify for the ballot. Barack Obama may not have met it. Investigators think 150 of the 534 signatures the Obama campaign turned in for St. Joseph County may have been forged.

Yet Democrats say that measures to guard against vote fraud are racist Republican plots to disenfranchise minority voters.

Republicans "want to literally drag us back to Jim Crow laws," said Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, D-Fla, chair of the Democratic National Committee.

The NAACP has asked the United Nations to intervene to block state voter ID laws. It may have an ulterior motive for opposing ballot security measures. An NAACP official was convicted on 10 counts of absentee voter fraud in Tunica County, Miss., in July.

Former Democratic Rep. Artur Davis, who is black, said vote fraud is rampant in African-American districts like his in Alabama.

"The most aggressive contemporary voter suppression in the African-American community is the wholesale manufacture of ballots at the polls and absentee, in parts of the Black Belt," Mr. Davis said. "Voting the names of the dead, and the nonexistent, and the too mentally impaired to function cancels out the votes of citizens who are exercising their rights."

Laws requiring photo IDs suppress minority voting, Democrats charge. The facts say otherwise. In Georgia, black voter turnout for the midterm election in 2006 was 42.9 percent. After Georgia passed photo ID, black turnout in the 2010 midterm rose to 50.4 percent. Black turnout also rose in Indiana and Mississippi after photo IDs were required.

"Concerns about voter identification laws affecting turnout are much ado about nothing," concluded researchers at the universities of Delaware and Nebraska after examining election data from 2000 through 2006.

You need a photo ID to get on an airplane or an Amtrak train; to open a bank account, withdraw money from it, or cash a check; to pick up movie and concert tickets; to go into a federal building; to buy alcohol and to apply for food stamps.

Most Americans don't think it's a hardship to ask voters to produce one. A Rasmussen poll in June indicated 75 percent of respondents support photo ID requirements. Huge majorities of Hispanics support voter ID laws, according to a Resurgent Republic poll in September.

This year there have been investigations, indictments or convictions for vote fraud in California, Texas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina and Maryland. In all but one case, the alleged fraudsters were Democrats.

In none would the fraud alleged have altered a major election, Democrats note. But in the Illinois gubernatorial election in 1982, 100,000 votes cast in Chicago -- 10 percent of the total -- were fraudulent, the U.S. attorney there estimated.

Fraud of the magnitude which swings elections typically combines absentee ballot fraud and voter registration fraud. At least 55 employees or associates of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now have been convicted of registration fraud in 11 states, says Matthew Vadum of the Capital Research Center, who's written a book about ACORN.

Of 1.3 million new registrations ACORN turned in in 2008, election officials rejected 400,000.

"There is no question about the legitimacy or importance of a state's interest in counting only eligible voters' votes," wrote liberal Justice John Paul Stevens for a 6-3 majority in the Supreme Court's 2008 decision upholding Indiana's ID law, the toughest in the nation.

In a speech Tuesday at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library at the University of Texas, Attorney General Eric Holder announced a full scale assault on the laws the Supreme Court said are constitutional and necessary.

Mr. Holder -- who apparently won't prosecute violations of the Voting Rights Act if the victims are white -- picked an appropriate venue for his attack on the integrity of the ballot. LBJ stole his first election to the Senate, according to one of his biographers.

A Gallup poll Tuesday indicates why Mr. Holder is trying so hard to gut ballot security measures. Mr. Obama trails in all swing states. Democrats fear they can't win next year unless they cheat.

Jack Kelly is a columnist for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio (jkelly@post-gazette.com, 412 263-1476). More articles by this author
First published on December 18, 2011 at 12:00 am


http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11352/1197406-373-0 .stm

I'm willing to bet Indiana's Secretary of State Charlie White Republican committed voter fraud while using a valid ID.



INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Indiana's top elections official could lose his job and his freedom after jurors convicted him of multiple voter fraud-related charges on Saturday, leaving in flux the fate of one of the state's most powerful positions.
Republican Secretary of State Charlie White has held on to his office for more than a year despite being accused of lying about his address on voter registration forms.
A Hamilton County jury found White guilty of six of seven felony charges, including false registration, voting in another precinct, submitting a false ballot, theft and two counts of perjury. He was acquitted on one fraud charge.
White expressed no outward emotion as the verdict was read, and later said outside the courtroom: "'I'm disappointed for my family and the people who supported me."
It wasn't immediately clear what would happen to White's elected office. He has resisted calls to resign from Democrats and Republicans, including Gov. Mitch Daniels, but state law bars anyone convicted of a felony from remaining in office.
White's attorney, Carl Brizzi, said he will ask the judge to reduce the charges to misdemeanors because his client has no criminal background and has a long record of public service.
Daniels announced Saturday he had appointed White's chief deputy, Jerry Bonnet, as interim secretary of state.
"I have chosen not to make a permanent appointment today out of respect for the judge's authority to lessen the verdict to a misdemeanor and reinstate the elected office holder," Daniels said in a statement. "If the felony convictions are not altered, I anticipate making a permanent appointment quickly."
Bonnet has worked for the secretary of state's office since 2005, the statement said.
The jury verdict came after a weeklong trial in which White, who had vigorously protested the charges in hearings before a state elections panel, presented no defense.
Prosecutors said he used his ex-wife's address instead of a condo he had with his fiancée because he didn't want to give up his $1,000-per-month Fishers Town Council salary after moving out of that district. He faced seven felony charges, including voter fraud, perjury and theft.
White, 42, has said the charges ignored a complicated personal life in which he was trying to raise his 10-year-old son, plan his second marriage and campaign for the statewide office he won that November. He said he stayed at his ex-wife's house when he wasn't on the road campaigning and did not live in the condo until after he remarried.
Brizzi told the jury during his closing arguments Friday that White's name was on the condo's bills and documents because he was paying for his fiancee and her children to live there, not because he was living at that address.
No sentencing date was set.
Republican special prosecutor John Dowd expressed satisfaction about the verdict.
"We believe it was about someone who violated the law and cheated the system — and gamed the system," Dowd said. "And, obviously, the jury thought the same way."
A Marion County judge has ruled that White should be replaced by Democrat Vop Osili, the man he defeated by about 300,000 votes in the November 2010 election, but that ruling is on hold pending an appeal.
Attorney Karen Celestino-Horseman, who watched the trial and spoke on behalf of Indiana Democrats following the verdict, said the party believes White's conviction further affirms that Osili should be secretary of state.
"(White) has been convicted, but the judge has left it open for misdemeanor sentencing. That's something that's going to have to be examined," she said.
During his closing arguments, assistant special prosecutor Dan Sigler Jr. argued that White knew that he was committing voter fraud but did it anyway for political power.
"If we aren't going to enforce election law against the secretary of state of Indiana, who are we going to enforce it against?" Sigler said.

http://news.yahoo.com/indiana-election-chief-found -guilty-voter-fraud-073551102.html

Signatures on petitions and voting at a polling place are two very different things, Blair. In fact, steps are proposed to change the incredibly lax rules governing the gathering of signatures on petitions. Existing rules at polling places are a damn sight tighter than with petitions.

Broden pointed out, for example, that petitions currently can be left out on tables for people to sign without any oversight. He also says that people who collect signatures do not legally have to note that they gathered the petitions, or even say that they believe the signatures are real.

"Under existing Indiana law, the person who gathers the signatures does not have to sign anything or indicate how they gathered the signatures ... the statue does not actually require a check of the signatures," Broden said

He said this creates an obvious loophole, and he thinks there should be an audit process to confirm that the petition signatures are genuine.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/12/14/in-wake -obama-petition-signature-probe-indiana-democrats- propose-new-rules/

^^That's just dumb. Allowing people to vote at the polling place where they're registered with two forms of alternate I.D. is not.

Again, the actual numbers on voter fraud are so minisucule that it is unnecessary to institute any stricter voting laws--no matter how just sort of sensible they may seem.

I've posted a couple of studies and investigations--one by the Bush administration, who I'm sure was desperate to encourage new voter I.D. laws--but if anyone can show me studies showing anything like significant numbers of voter fraud, I'm all ears.

Drivel.

>>>but if anyone can show me studies showing anything like significant numbers of voter fraud, I'm all ears.

look at the report from ACORN.

btw, it's a federal law where i work that requires the photo id be shown for the customer to pay their bill. federal law, not a business practice.

so if the fed can mandate something like that, i see no logical reason not to show ID when voting

As long as that I.D. is free, there's no contitutional reason, either.

^^Former Democratic Rep. Artur Davis, who is black, said vote fraud is rampant in African-American districts like his in Alabama.

"The most aggressive contemporary voter suppression in the African-American community is the wholesale manufacture of ballots at the polls and absentee, in parts of the Black Belt," Mr. Davis said. "Voting the names of the dead, and the nonexistent, and the too mentally impaired to function cancels out the votes of citizens who are exercising their rights."

So according to former Representative Davis, there are more dead voters and mentally incompetent voters in his district than alive and normally intelligent voters. Perhaps the Alabama Secretary of State needs to properly do his job and purge the voter rolls of deceased persons. Unfortunately there are many mentally incompetent people voting (Rick Santorum wins three contests) and I do not know if it disqualifies someone from voting.

That sound like the words of a rather bitter FORMER member of the House of Representative.

^^As long as that I.D. is free, there's no contitutional reason, either.


Although many states are making the ID's free, they are not making the necessary supporting documents free. If you need a copy of your birth, marriage or divorce certificate that is not free.

If it cost $50 to get the documentation necessary to get the photo ID, is that a poll tax?

Doesn't even have to be a poll tax. The 24th says poll tax or "other tax." But, I do think if the I.D. is free, this is not a 24th Amendment issue.

And with all this, it was a Republican convicted of voter fraud charges...

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57372176-50 3544/indiana-sec-of-state-convicted-of-voter-fraud /

having a fee in place in order to vote is counter productive to the objective... which is inclusion and participation.

>>>>btw, it's a federal law where i work that requires the photo id be shown for the customer to pay their bill. federal law, not a business practice.


what law is that? If it's a federal law you should be able to provide a link to it.

I've never had any business ask for an ID to take my money. But I just had the federal govt. lose a check I sent them. Or they lost the record that I had sent it. After it was cashed.