State Senate Could Soon Vote to Require Photo ID at Polls

State lawmakers are again looking at making voters show a photo ID in order to cast a ballot.

Rutherford County Senator Bill Ketron is sponsoring a measure to make voters at the polls show photo identification, like a driver’s license or military ID.

A similar bill passed in the Senate last year, with supporters raising the specter of non-citizens voting. This year Ketron says the measure is aimed at felons who are still on voting lists even though they should have lost their voting rights upon conviction.

“The election coordinator for the state of Tennessee said they have purged over a hundred convicted felons that were still on the ballots, and we’re still going through that process throughout our state.”

But Hedy Weinberg, with the American Civil Liberties Union, says the bill would turn away some legal voters.

“You are going to clearly disenfranchise some voters. Certainly those who are older, those who are poor, those who don’t have access to photo IDs.”

Older people who have given up driving often don’t have licenses, and state law allows people over 60 to have a non-photo license.

Ketron’s bill passed out of committee on a party line vote, six Republicans to three Democrats, and can now head to the Senate floor. In previous years the measure has failed in the House, but with a strong GOP majority this year, Republicans expect it will pass easily.

WEB EXTRAS:

The bill is SB16 Ketron/HB07 Maggart.

Ketron, a Rutherford County Republican, says the bill dates back to the occasion when the Senate barred Memphis Senator Ophelia Ford from taking her seat after a special election marred by numerous irregularities, in which a voting official illegally entered several invalid votes.

“When the Republican Senate was sued, in Federal Court on the Ophelia Ford case, I was sitting there the whole day, listening to the testimony back and forth, and I said there’s got to be a better way of protecting that person who wants to vote, and it’s as simple as showing the photo ID. … It didn’t have anything to do with illegal immigrants.”

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The ACLU’s Weinberg says if the bill passes, it should have an amendment directing local election commissions to educate the public about the new requirement.

“If any individual doesn’t have the money to have a photo ID, he or she could sign an oath and be allowed to vote. And we respect that and admire that. At the same time however, people don’t know that. So if this bill is going to move forward, we would hope it would move forward with a very clear statement requiring local election commissions to share that information — billboards, mailings to registered voters so that they understand, you need to bring a photo ID or, A, B and C.”

Ketron says he would consider such an amendment after it is drafted.

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Mark Goins, election coordinator in the state Secretary of State’s office, later clarified several numbers used by proponents and opponents of the bill.

Goins says that in 2009 his office identified “thousands” of convicted felons whose names had not been purged from voting rolls.

Goins says that of those, “hundreds” had actually either lied on an application to vote (after being released from prison but before having voting rights restored) or had actually voted illegally.

A person who had previously registered to vote and then was convicted might still be on the voter rolls through no specific fault of his own. District attorneys said they would prosecute cases where the individual had actually voted.

Goins estimated that local district attorneys have almost “a hundred” convictions on such grounds in the last year.