Georgia's alarming voter ID requirement

The push and pull have begun over renewing a key provision of the Voting Rights Act that doesn't expire until 2007, but already a case-in-point has appeared that argues strongly for extension. A disputed section requires only states with a history of racial discrimination -- mainly the South's old Confederacy states -- to get Justice Department approval for any changes in their voting laws.

Many in the region argue that the covered states have been on probation long enough and have reformed and taken the changes to heart. A much touted New South has replaced the Old.

And, in fact, no few indices can be cited in support of that pitch. But then there's Georgia's new voting law.

Passed quickly this year by Georgia's first Republican legislature since Reconstruction -- and one heady with its historic turn -- the law requires government photo IDs for voters, commonly a driver's license. The law was pitched as necessary to fight fraud, but there have been no ID-based voting scams in the state since the era years ago when the state's cemeteries sometimes voted in alphabetical order.

The state's vestigial Democrats and a number of civil rights organizations protested that the law would disproportionately disenfranchise minority and elderly voters, who tend to vote Democratic, and rural voters. Many in those categories don't drive, would be hard pressed to spring the $20 that the state charges for a personal photo ID and often live too far from a state issuing office to make the trip easily.

The Justice Department signed off on the change even so, but the law has been blocked at least for now by a federal court, which sensibly worries the requirement amounts to a new poll tax. The law's apparent even-handedness would produce skewed results in practice and arguably was meant to.

Subsequent events have supported that suspicion. A memo has surfaced that shows several Justice Department lawyers concluded the law would be discriminatory. In addition to its analyses, the staff was provoked by comments like one from a state representative from Augusta, quoted in the memo as saying that if fewer black voters because of the bill, it will only be because black voters don't go to the polls unless they are bribed. (So much for all those African-Americans who, over generations, were lynched, beaten, fired and terrorized for attempting to vote.)

As is often the Bush administration pattern, the Justice Department's professional staff was overridden by the political commissars in charge.

Georgia Republicans are scrambling to rescue their law. One legislator proposes letting city and county governments also issue photo IDs and waiving the requirement that poor applicants file a pauper's affidavit to qualify for a free state ID, all instead of simply accepting such other forms of identification as bank statements and utility bills -- the case in the five other states that request photo IDs and Georgia's policy until this year.

When any party is this determined to pursue a dubious remedy for an electoral problem that doesn't exist, warning bells go off. The ones sounding in Georgia should still be ringing in Congress when the Voting Rights Act comes up for renewal.

(Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers.)