Following House approval, Senate to vote on voter photo ID amendment

The Minnesota Senate may have already decided on whether to bring to a public vote the amendment question; the Minnesota House approved the measure earlier this week.

Under the bills, a ballot question would ask if voters if they would like to add an amendment to the Minnesota Constitution that would require that, on Election Day, all voters present government issued photo identification prior to cast a ballot. A majority vote of the people would amend the Constitution, and the Legislature would implement the new photo ID requirement in 2013. This amendment would also require state identification be made available at no charge to those who do not already have an ID.

 The amendment does not include any mandates for spending or technology requirements. Enacting legislation would be decided by the Legislature only after the amendment is approved during the 2012 November election.

Proponents of the bill, including chief author of the House bill, Rep. Mary Kiffmeyer said the measure will add integrity to the voter registration system.

But critics of the bill say there isn’t enough information about how the measure would be implemented. And they said the issue should not be placed in the Constitution. Instead, some said that a different bill, which includes details of implementation, should be considered through the legislative process and be enacted as a law.

“An unfunded mandate” is how Koochiching County Auditor/Treasurer Bob Peterson views the measure.

“We don’t know how it would be implemented. That’s what we’re nervous about,” he said. Minnesota auditors have been told that mail ballots would not be impacted, “but that’s hard to say until final bill (if approved by voters) is passed.”

Many voters in Koochiching County cast their ballots by mail.

In addition, Peterson said he doesn’t see a need for photo ID for voting in Borderland.

“People know each other,” he said. “Can you picture a person who has lived all their life in Big Falls and not be able to vote if they don’t have a voter ID, when the election judges have known them for years?”

He compared the bills at the Legislature to a plan to build a space ship, but worrying later about what parts are needed and the costs of those parts.

Peterson said he had recently discussed his thoughts about the voter ID proposal with area legislators.

Legislators’ views

Rep. Tom Anzelc said he voted against bringing the measure to the voters.

“I voted no on the voter ID, primarily because the author could not explain how a person in northern Minnesota who votes by absentee ballot, and especially by mail-in ballot, how that person was going to be able to get a photo ID and how that would work on a mail-in ballot. It seems really a bad idea to me and I’d say about 15 percent of people in my House District 3A vote either absentee or by mail.”

Sen. Tom Saxhaug said he would vote against the measure. Saxhaug said voter photo ID is not needed in a state which consistently has the highest voter turnout of any state, with little incident of voter fraud.

And, he said, the issue shouldn’t be placed in the state’s Constitution.

“Legislating through the Constitution is not a healthy way of making law,” he said. “We were elected to write and create laws. Laws passed have to have concurrence of the Legislature and signed by the governor, or have enough votes to override a governor veto.”

If voter photo ID is an important issue, it should be on the books as a law, not an amendment, he said.

A voter photo ID requirement would be difficult to implement in rural and northern Minnesota, “especially for those of us who do mail-in ballots and where our demographic is older. We would be more adversely effected than anybody else,” Saxhaug said.

Because of redistricting, Sen. Tom Bakk and Rep. David Dill could represent Borderland after January if reelected in November.

Bakk also said he would vote against the measure. He said the real problem with the bill is the language that states “government issued” ID and he wonders what kind of ID will be adequate. He said the word “issued” should be changed to “approved.”

He said defining something the Constitution which could change in the future in is unwise. “IDs will change over time,” he said. “Future Legislatures should have the ability to change what a government approved ID is. That’s a significant issue.”

He also said there are problems with absentee and mail-in ballots in places where courthouses may be located 100 miles or more away from where a voter lives.

But the larger issue, he said, is placing what should be enacted as law into the Constitution. He said two years ago, he proposed that amendments should be approved with a larger percent of the Legislature’s approval. “Amending the Constitution is so important it ought to be only done with bipartisan support at Legislature,” he said.

Issues can change with which party holds the majority at the Legislature and in the governor’s office.

“(Amendments) shouldn’t be used as way to get your thing into law and around a governor veto,” he said.

Rep. David Dill said he voted against the bill at the House.

And while Dill said requiring voter ID is a good idea, it must be done so with a plan that works properly.

“I am not against it, but I want it to work,” he said.

The problem with the bill that passed off the House floor “is that it is so ambiguous that it doesn’t work,” he said. “It is a poorly drafted bill.”

And, he said, the measure should not become an amendment to the Constitution.

“The Constitution is a place where things last a long, long time, if not forever,” he said. “In 100 years are we going to be using a photographic ID? I doubt it with the quickly changing technology. But the amendment says ‘photographic ID’.”

He said amendments to the House bill to put in another definition to accommodate technology changes were offered, but did not move forward with the bill.

Details of such a proposal must be in the bill, he said.

“Almost none of the questions about how it will work operationally were in the bill,” he said. “The answer was the Legislature, after the amendment passes and the Constitution is amended, will decide how to deal with those things.”

Dill said other states, including Texas and Arizona, have voter ID measures as law, not as amendments to their state constitutions.

Other questions he raised about the wording of the bill include which government would issue the ID. “The government of Iraq? That should probably be specified in the language,” he said.

And, he noted, students at Rainy River Community College could use their college ID to vote because it is a state college. But private college IDs would not make students eligible to vote under the current wording of the bill.

And, he said, an amendment to the Constitution must be done carefully.

“What if the Republicans amend the Constitution and put in the most stringent things, and then later the Democrats take control and put in the most liberal things there are,” he said. “We need some homogenization that works rather than amendments.”