How’s that again?

— Earlier this month, your newspaper featured a mini-debate among a handful of lawmakers in Arkansas who faced off over the issue of voter fraud. Or the lack thereof.

Some of our distinguished legislators want to require voter ID at the polls. Because, you know, making sure the person voting in an election for president, governor or town alderman is legit should be at least as important as cashing a check or getting a library card. Other lawmakers said, nah, forcing somebody to show ID would make it harder to cast a ballot, and, by the way, this ain’t 1952. Nobody’s passing out whiskey bottles and cash on election day. Nobody’s hoarding marked ballots until they find out how many votes they need. Nobody’s “losing” whole boxes of ballots.

Voting fraud? What voting fraud? Or as one lawmaker put it when dismissing the voter ID bill: “It seems like a solution chasing a problem that doesn’t exist.”

His statement didn’t come at the most propitious time. The next day’s paper featured a story on Page 1 in which four people pled guilty in federal court to buying votes. One of them was a state legislator.

Now comes this week’s news in the same case. Five more people in Crittenden County were charged with using absentee ballots to steal an election. They’ll be arraigned soon. That’s nine people in one county charged in this case. So far.

Voter fraud is alive and well. At least according to those in charge of guarding against it.

Arkansas, and every other state, needs all the protection it can get against this kind of scam at the polls. The integrity of elections is central to a democracy. We can take another step in that direction by passing a comprehensive law against voter fraud that makes it clear, among other things, that absentee voting is only for the absentees, not the kind of crooks who just buy and use other people’s ballots.

Editorial, Pages 16 on 09/28/2012

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