LITTLE ROCK — When then-Gov. Mike Huckabee said he was concerned that elections in Arkansas made us look like a “banana republic,” he was roundly criticized.
Maybe he should have been more circumspect-maybe he should have said that Arkansas was a chicken-and vodka republic.
Last month, a colleague-state Rep. Uvalde Lindsey-was quoted in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette as saying that requiring voters to show ID at the polls “seems like a solution chasing a problem that doesn’t exist.”
The day that this denial appeared in the newspaper was the very same day that another colleague of mine-state Rep. Hudson Hallum-resigned from the Legislature after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit election fraud. Hallum explained that his method of vote-buying relied on chicken and cheap vodka.
Some people will never admit that vote fraud is a problem in Arkansas. But some of us know better. And requiring voter ID is part of the solution to cleaner, better elections.
Opponents of voter ID, such as the ACLU, often argue that it will disenfranchise people for whom it would be difficult to get a photo ID they could use at the polls. In fact, one reason that the ACLU has regularly lost in court when challenging these laws is that they have great difficulty finding anyone who can’t get an ID. The number of people who want to vote but don’t have and can’t get an ID is extraordinarily small.
Even Barack Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, has gotten into the act. Holder has stated that requiring voter ID violates voters’ constitutional rights. It’s a funny thing, though; if you want to visit Holder at the Department of Justice, you have to show ID to get inside the building. Why, it’s almost as if the concern Holder’s expressing-that requiring citizens to show ID in order to vote is so burdensome as to be unconstitutional-isn’t entirely serious.
The Arkansas political establishment can’t get high marks here either. They’ve refused to act on reports of vote fraud in east Arkansas. I hope their refusal to act is based on limited resources or laziness, but sometimes I fear that there are worse explanations.
For instance, you might not have known that the state board of election commissioners was asked to send monitors to watch over absentee ballots in the east Arkansas special election Hallum won last year. The board’s Democratic Party representative, Jason Willett, made the motion to deny sending election monitors. Later on, Hallum hired Willett as a consultant and has paid his firm $15,000.
When I asked Susie Stormes, the board’s director, if she thought that Willett’s paycheck was a conflict of interest, she said something interesting: that because she didn’t control the appointment or service of board members, it wasn’t her place to say whether it was a conflict of interest.
I can tell you, however, that even though I don’t control the appointment or service of board members, I darn sure think it was a conflict of interest-and that there’s nothing wrong with saying so.
Tim Humphries, the lawyer for the state board, later explained to the newspaper that there’s really no way to monitor the use or misuse of absentee ballots under current law.
That suggests to me that current election law is pretty much an open invitation to vote fraud-and that Hudson Hallum probably isn’t the only one who has acted on that invitation.
Maybe someday, the people who piled onto Mike Huckabee for suggesting that Arkansas resembles a banana republic will apologize. Recent events show that he was on to something.
The citizens of Arkansas have a constitutional right to live in a state where elections are conducted fairly and everyone’s vote counts equally. And we have a moral right to have elections we can be proud of.
Requiring voters to show ID is an important piece of that puzzle.
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Bryan King is running unopposed for the state Senate District 5 seat in the Legislature.
Editorial, Pages 19 on 10/20/2012