Indiana's Voter ID Model

MILWAUKEE, WIS. — A friend of mine thought our state, Wisconsin, was lackadaisical about voting fraud. So he used to play a little game. When poll workers asked him his name, he'd whip out his driver's license, something the law refused to require. It made him feel subversive.

You can get the same thrill of superfluous obedience in at least 23 states, including New York. If you're lucky, the pollworker might say, as one did to my friend, "Oh, we don't need to see that" and you can say back, "You should."

Don't bet on many of those 23 states, the ones that meet only the minimum federal requirement, strengthening their anti-voting fraud rules soon. National elections, thus, will turn on suspect results. Sure, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week that Indiana was perfectly justified in asking voters for picture ID. That doesn't mean other states have to do the same. Many probably won't. The matter is tied to too many other American arguments.

Across the land, officials rushed to say their states would change nothing. New York and New Jersey can go on requiring merely a bank statement — presumably your own. Wisconsin can continue letting you vote if a "friend" vouches for you. Commentators and activists praised this, saying that other states ought to go on denying the danger of fraud because to do otherwise would disenfranchise voters.

Though Justice John Paul Stevens, perhaps the court's biggest liberal, says asking voters for ID does no such harm. He cited the James Baker-Jimmy Carter voting reform panel that says officials "need to make sure that the person arriving at a polling site is the same one that is named on the registration list." Everyone else, from Amtrak to check cashers, makes you show ID, and "voting is equally important," they wrote.

Indiana took this seriously in 2005 and landed in court. But the state also made it as easy as possible to get identification. A state photo ID is free for the poor. Critics complain that the prerequisite, a birth certificate, costs money. But the law says older people, those most likely to lack such a paper, don't need it. They can use their Medicare cards or a half-dozen other documents. Lacking any, a voter simply can swear to a court clerk that he's broke. Critics are reduced to saying the lack of universal bus service to the license office is a grievous barrier.

"There's always some incidental costs to voting — you can't come to the polls naked," an Indianapolis law professor, Abdul Hakim-Shabazz, who served on the task force that wrote the rules, says. The remarkable thing is that for all the talk of disenfranchisement, Indiana has had seven elections since, and those challenging the law have yet to turn up a plaintiff who credibly can say the law stymied him, Mr. Hakim-Shabazz says.

To the contrary, Indiana's turnout was up 2% in 2006 over the previous midterm voting. Voter registration is up by 150,000 since January. This doesn't suggest barricaded polls. A prominent election turnout researcher and economics professor at the University of Missouri, Jeffrey Milyo, found last year that the only consistent effect of the law was increased turnout in heavily Democratic counties.

So much for the notion that fighting fraud is a Republican plot.

Still, in at least 23 other states, this makes no dent. That's because voter ID is a surrogate for so many other fights.

In Texas and Arizona, the matter was snagged in arguments over immigration and requiring proof of citizenship. Elsewhere, with the argument centering on those so destitute they cannot afford a birth certificate, opposing ID becomes another way of saying American life is hopelessly stacked against the poor and that we can expect nothing of them.

Foes of anti-fraud rules constantly say there's no danger of cheating. But Justice Stevens reasons that the minimal hassle in Indiana is a good trade-off to forestall cheating. The only way to make free IDs look burdensome, then, is to deny they gain you anything — to say there's no fraud.

Which is nonsense. The Carter panel said there was, citing as instances votes from the dead in Seattle and double voting in Milwaukee. It noted that this could throw close elections. Prosecutors nationwide turn up registration schemes that taint the voting rolls with uncaught ringers, while Justice Stevens cited New York's ancient Tammany tradition of voting often to point out the obvious: If you leave holes, cheats exploit them.

The foes of anti-fraud ID insist that the cure to shaken confidence is to not dwell on fraud, but this cultivated agnosticism spreads the message that we won't watch for other forms of cheating. Critics note, correctly, that absentee ballots are a bigger problem than voter impersonation, but their remedies are easier absentee balloting, voting by mail, and longer hours. None touch the core problem — the will to cheat — because critics, having to deny fraud, insist it's all "irregularity," not malice.

The charitable interpretation is that states unwilling to ask for ID are so committed to eliminating any barrier to voting that they're willing to accept dodgy election results — let every vote be counted, twice if necessary. But this reduces voting to a kind of ritual, where taking part in the act is more important than the material result. Which is nonsense, if you believe in democracy: The outcome very much counts.

There is a decent trade-off to be made between access and security, and Indiana seems to have found it. "I never thought Indiana would be the model for the country of how to do anything," Mr. Hakim-Shabazz says. It isn't, not yet at least, but it ought to be.

Mr. McIlheran is a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.