Nine years ago this week, the RN&R editorialized about a state legislative proposal to require voter ID at the polls:
Our favorite case of voter fraud happened in Carson City. An elderly woman with Alzheimers voted twice. The “crime” was not uncovered until a couple of weeks after the election at the family Thanksgiving. Comparing notes, a daughter and granddaughter discovered they had both aided Grandma in voting—once at early voting, once on election day. What master criminals!
The family informed county clerk treasurer Alan Glover, who arranged a change in procedures so it would not happen again. It was the only instance of voter fraud Glover encountered in his many years in office. The same is true of every election official we have ever interviewed—rare oddball circumstances, and that’s the sum total of fraudulent voting in a nation of 300 million voters. Every reporter, every scholar, every government investigator has found the same thing. For our 2012 look at the issue of voter fraud, (go here).
But Republicans always come up with isolated, freakish anecdotes to scare people into believing the notion of the ease of stealing elections—this quirky case in Kentucky, that odd incident in Montana. But they can never produce any evidence of any broad or sweeping problem of fraudulent voting. That’s because there isn’t any.
Still they keep publicizing the “threat.” Why? Because they want laws requiring voters to present identification before they can vote. The groups that do not have driver licenses—elderly people who have stopped driving, low-income people who do not own cars—tend to vote Democratic. So Republicans want to win through bureaucratic machinations elections they can’t win on the issues.
Washoe Republican Assemblymember Lisa Krasner, one of the more partisan lawmakers, has introduced a bill requiring Nevadans to show identification before voting. Wasn’t it just a few weeks ago that Republicans were arguing against a vote for legal marijuana because it would create a need for more unnecessary bureaucracy? It’s good to know that Republicans like Krasner see government as the answer to our nonexistent problems. Now if they could only see it as an answer to actual problems.
Krasner represents a Washoe district, so her action suggests a certain lack of confidence in the Washoe Voter Registrar’s office and its ability to keep elections clean, though it has an excellent record under both registrar Luanne Cutler and her predecessor Dan Burk.
And every bill costs some money. Just drafting and introducing bills involves a few hundred dollars, in Krasner’s case for a bill that is a solution without a problem. Asking the legislative bill drafting division to write it up was a waste of tax dollars. Introducing it wasted more. With any kind of luck, her legislative colleagues will ignore it now and prevent any more wasted money on hearings.
Every Nevadan must present identification when he or she registers to vote. After that, the problem is getting them to vote at all. And voter fraud happens more in the counting end than the voting end, where it is clean as a whistle.
Krasner and her fellow Republicans spread misleading stories about voter fraud, then respond to the public concern they have generated about an imaginary problem by calling for government action that will reduce the number of Democratic votes. Now, that’s a fraud.
Today, at the federal level, an even more restrictive bill is wending its way through Congress.
If you’re unfamiliar with the so-called SAVE America Act, here’s a primer, from NPR:
A Republican voting overhaul is back on Capitol Hill—with an added photo identification provision and an altered name—as President Trump seeks to upend elections in a midterm year. Opponents say the legislation would disenfranchise millions of voters.
The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act—now dubbed the SAVE America Act—narrowly passed the U.S. House last week, with all Republicans and one Democrat backing the bill. …
The overhaul would require eligible voters to provide proof of citizenship—like a valid U.S. passport, or a birth certificate plus valid photo identification—when registering to vote. The new iteration adds a requirement that voters also provide photo ID when casting their ballot. …
It’s already illegal for non-U.S. citizens to vote in federal elections, and proven instances of fraud—including by noncitizens—are vanishingly rare.
But … Republicans say current law, which requires sworn attestation of citizenship under penalty of perjury, is not strong enough, and documentary proof is needed.
Some states already take steps to verify citizenship for newly registered voters. And three dozen states also require voters to show an ID to cast a ballot, with some mandating it be a photo ID, while others allow additional options, such as a bank statement.
Democrats and voting rights advocates say the new SAVE Act is even worse than the prior iteration, and that the legislation’s two main identification requirements would make voting notably more difficult for tens of millions of Americans who don’t have easy access to necessary personal documentation. About half of Americans didn’t have a passport as of 2023, for instance.
It’s disconcertingly common for politicians to use proposed laws to accomplish goals that have nothing to do with those laws. As we’ve reported, Gov. Joe Lombardo is pushing a proposed amendment to the state Constitution to ban transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports—even though this is an “issue” that affects between zero and a tiny handful of people in the state. The real reason Lombardo wants the proposed amendment on the ballot is because he sees it as a wedge issue that will bring conservatives to the polls, thereby helping his re-election chances—something he has admitted behind closed doors.
Similarly, the “SAVE America Act” really has nothing to do with voter fraud, because voter fraud is, as NPR put it, “vanishingly rare.”
It has EVERYTHING to do with, as we said in our editorial nine years ago, the fact that “Republicans want to win through bureaucratic machinations elections they can’t win on the issues.”
Trump and his fellow Republicans are facing a very difficult midterm congressional election this year, and the more people—primarily citizens who are indeed eligible to vote, yet don’t have easy access to the documents this onerous bill requires—they can keep away from the polls, the better their chances are.
—Jimmy Boegle
Read this newsletter at RenoNR.com!