Pawlenty urges voter ID changes

09/29/2006

BY BILL SALISBURY
Pioneer Press

Joining a national debate between Democrats and Republicans over voter-identification laws, GOP Gov. Tim Pawlenty on Wednesday announced he has taken a step to prevent voter fraud and, if re-elected, will ask the Legislature to pass additional voting requirements.

Democrats labeled his plan an election-year gimmick and warned that it would make voting more difficult for thousands of eligible voters.

“Evidence has recently been discovered suggesting that noncitizens are registering and voting in Minnesota elections,” Pawlenty said in a news release. “These cases highlight a threat to the legitimacy of our democracy and the need for change. Our citizen verification system needs an upgrade.

“We need a voting system that makes it easy to vote but hard to cheat,” he said.

Since the 2004 election, Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer’s office has found evidence that 32 noncitizens registered to vote and 11 of them voted, Pawlenty reported. Those suspected cases of voter fraud were referred to county attorneys for prosecution, he said.

Kiffmeyer reported the attempts by 32 noncitizens to register to vote in February 2005. Asked why the governor waited until seven weeks before the election to raise the issue, Alex Carey, Pawlenty’s deputy press secretary, said it was only in the “last several months” that investigators uncovered evidence that noncitizens actually voted. Carey didn’t know whether any of them had been convicted.

Pawlenty said he directed the Department of Public Safety’s division of driver and vehicle services to routinely share with the secretary of state the visa status information it collects on driver’s licenses it issues to noncitizens.

Kiffmeyer said her staff already had access to that information.

“The key thing is we now have a more routine and systematic process” for gathering that data, she said.

Pawlenty said he also would ask the Legislature to pass a law requiring people to show a photo identification card issued by a state, federal or tribal government in order to vote.

Across the nation, Republicans are pushing for photo ID laws, saying they are needed to prevent voter fraud and boost public confidence in elections.

Democrats argue that there’s little fraud and that Republicans are trying to suppress the votes of the poor, elderly and minorities who are less likely to have the required documents — and are more likely to vote for Democrats.

State DFL Chairman Brian Melendez said Pawlenty, after failing to act on citizenship verification for nearly four years, is now resorting to “fear mongering” 40 days before the Nov. 7 election.

“He’s using a sample of 32 voters. That’s 0.00103 percent of the 3,030,921 registered voters in Minnesota,” Melendez said in a statement. “Pushing photo identification based on these cases is like using a cannon to swat a fly. You may succeed in killing the fly, but you’re going to do a lot of damage in the process.”

The damage, said Sen. John Marty, DFL-Roseville, is that a photo ID requirement would disenfranchise many eligible voters, including elderly people who no longer drive and don’t have licenses and people who have lost their wallets or forgotten to bring their driver’s licenses to the polls.

“I’ll guarantee you that instead of a handful of ineligible people voting, they’ll be turning away thousands of people who don’t have a photo ID with them,” said Marty, former chairman of the Senate Elections Committee.

“It seems to me it’s a solution in search of a problem, and it’s a very punitive one that will hurt lots of people,” he said.

But Kiffmeyer said Minnesota’s lax voter-identification laws almost invite voter fraud.

“I hear about it from young people, who tell me, ‘Ma’am, I could bust this system so easy,’ “ she said.

Requiring voters to produce a photo ID “is just common sense to me,” she said.

Earlier this year, the Republican-controlled Minnesota House passed a bill requiring a photo ID to vote, but it died in the DFL-run Senate. Wisconsin’s Republican-led Legislature has repeatedly passed voter photo ID bills, but Democratic Gov. James Doyle has vetoed them.

The U.S. House, voting along party lines, last week passed a bill that would require anyone registering to vote in a federal election to show photo identification that proves he or she is a U.S. citizen.