Texans deserve common-sense voter ID requirements

Voter ID is important to me and to the overwhelming majority of Texans who believe in the integrity of our electoral process.

My office is appealing a recent lower court ruling to the United States Supreme Court. We are doing so because we believe this issue is important enough to be fully adjudicated by the highest court in our land.

Under the Texas voter identification law, voters must show a government-issued photo identification in order to cast their ballots.

Texans who do not already have a driver’s license, passport, military identification card or other approved form of identification can get a state-issued voter identification card free from the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Additionally, anyone who is disabled or over the age of 65 can vote by mail, which allows them to use mail-in ballots without having to get a photo identification.

The Texas Legislature enacted the photo voter identification law in 2011 amid overwhelming support throughout the state.

A few months before the law’s passage, a poll conducted by the University of Texas and the Texas Tribune revealed that 75 percent of Texas voters agreed that voters should be required to present a government-issued photo ID to vote.

The support was universal: 58 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of African-Americans and 68 percent of Hispanics.

The Legislature enacted the law to help deter and detect election fraud and to improve the public’s confidence in our elections, both of which the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized as valid state interests.

Indeed, even the Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, agrees: “The electoral system cannot inspire public confidence if no safeguards exist to deter or detect fraud or to confirm the identity of voters.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has also explained that voter identification laws are justified because flagrant examples of election fraud have been documented throughout U.S. history.

The U.S. Department of Justice says federal prosecutors have secured election fraud convictions against more than 100 defendants since 2002.

During the same period, the Texas Attorney General’s Office successfully prosecuted more than 50 individuals for violating the Texas Election Code.

Those convictions include a woman who submitted her deceased mother’s ballot, an activist who cast votes illegally for elderly voters and a city council member who unlawfully registered ineligible foreign nationals so they could support her in a contested election.

In previous rulings, the Supreme Court has also made clear that photo identification requirements are nondiscriminatory.

The court said it is not too much to ask of voters to get photo identification.

The inconvenience of making a trip to the Department of Public Safety, gathering the required documents and posing for a photograph surely does not qualify as a substantial burden on the right to vote, or even represent a significant increase over the burdens of voting.

Indeed, President Obama’s Department of Justice, which sued Texas to block our voter ID law, never identified a single person who faced a legally substantial obstacle to voting during the dozens of elections where Texas’ voter ID law was enforced.

Safeguarding the integrity of our elections process is essential to preserving our democracy, and our common-sense law provides simple protections to ensure our elections accurately reflect the will of the voters of Texas.

This story was originally published August 17, 2016 at 5:35 PM with the headline "Texans deserve common-sense voter ID requirements."