Don Palmer, a former secretary of the Virginia State Board of Elections, has a great piece over at the Heritage Foundation's Daily Signal website about the Washington Post's erroneous reporting about the number of Old Dominion voters supposedly at risk of being disenfranchised for lacking proper government-issued ID.
While the liberal media's bias on voter ID issues is relatively dormant right now, being an election year we can expect the controversy will arise afresh in coming months, both because of relevant court challenges but also because liberal Democrats will try to milk the faux controversy as a political repression narrative for the Democratic Party's base.
In his December 27 story, Palmer dissects "How The Washington Post Got Virginia’s Voter ID Law Wrong," in a September 2014 story alarmingly insisting that "200,000 in Va. may lack proper ID needed to vote."
You can read Palmer's full story here. Below are some crucial excerpts about the 200,000 number is grossly overinflated:
In the legislative debate for the bill, a variety of progressive groups opposed the legislation. A joint letter sent to the governor urging him to veto the bill claimed that an estimated “870,000 Virginians lack valid government-issued photo IDs.”
These exaggerated numbers were then used to argue that the law would be prohibitively expensive to implement. For example, the Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis claimed that implementation would cost between $7.3 million and $21.8 million, and these numbers were later regurgitated by major Virginia newspapers, including the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va.
Demos (another interest group) added to the flood of misinformation with an even more inflated number, claiming that the law would disenfranchise 1,154,000 Virginians and cost over $12.2 million to implement.
[...]
One common failing of opponents is they ignore other photo ID options available to voters.
For example, one of the primary forms of federal ID—a U.S. passport—has never been accounted for in these voter list comparisons. However, over 2.4 million passports have been issued to citizens since 2010. Another 78,000 Virginia residents who were naturalized from 2010 to 2013 possess a certificate of naturalization with a photo, acceptable as an ID.
All 500,000 students enrolled in public universities and colleges in Virginia, regardless of where they are from or where they are registered to vote, have a university photo ID, which is acceptable for voting in Virginia.
Virginia is home to a number of military installations, with 129,699 active-duty military members who possess photo ID cards that allow them to conduct business on military installations. Virginia also has approximately 781,388 military veterans, the majority of whom possess military retiree or veteran IDs.
Assuming that the national percentage rate of enrollment into Veterans Affairs health care holds true for Virginia, an estimated 42 percent—or 329,328—of these veterans would be enrolled and would likely have a Veteran Health Identification Card, an eligible photo ID for voting.
Another 332,600 federal and state employees in Virginia were not included in the analysis conducted by interest groups or The Washington Post. Each of these employees has a photo ID that is acceptable to cast a vote. Counties and cities across Virginia employ another 376,000 local employees with an acceptable government ID.
All in all, critics of the Virginia photo ID law fail to account for over 708,600 federal, state, and local employees, not including the hundreds of thousands of privately employed Virginians, who have been issued photo IDs that are acceptable for voting purposes.
Obviously voter-qualification laws differ state-by-state and so, accordingly, the contours of the voter ID debate can never truly be national in scope. That matters not, however, to a national liberal media that would much rather drill down on a simplistic narrative than have an honest debate about the policy specifics.
Kudos to Palmer for writing his piece and here's hoping others will do the same as the issue inevitably heats up again this election season.
