1) Missouri has debated stricter voter ID laws for over a decade, with Republicans generally pushing for them and Democrats opposing. In November, voters will decide on a ballot measure that could make Missouri's voting requirements the strictest in the nation. 2) Proponents argue stricter laws prevent voter fraud, but studies show very little evidence of voter impersonation fraud. Opponents argue they disproportionately impact minority, elderly, student, and Democratic voters. 3) A 2010 state house election was swung by two family members committing voter fraud for one candidate. However, the proposed laws may not have prevented this specific incident of fraud involving false voter registration.

1. http://www.voxmagazine.com/news/features/show-me-id/article_f85d7d52-eaa7-517d-8eaa-
407531c44280.html
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Show-Me ID
A vote in November could make Missouri's voting requirements more stringent
JARED MCNETT JUN 30, 2016
Photo illustration by Ryan Berry
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2. In 2010, a Democratic primary for a state house race in northeast Kansas City pitted John Rizzo
against Will Royster, two individuals whose family histories were woven into local politics. Rizzo
and Royster were vying for the seats that were once held by each of their fathers. Rizzo had the
name recognition, while Royster boasted his history of local volunteer work. No Republican
candidate was competing in the general election, so the primary would determine the outcome.
Whoever won would head to the state capitol in Jefferson City.
The final count was 664-663. Months of campaigning came down to a single vote. After a nasty
campaign involving accusations of predatory lending and job service puffery, Rizzo won the 40th
District Primary on Aug. 3, 2010. A recount took place, and the count was the same. Rizzo was
still the victor.
In the following years, Royster alleged foul play and fraud in an attempt to get the election tossed
and call for an investigation. His outcry affected nothing until June 2013, when Rizzo's aunt and
uncle, Clara and John Morentina, pleaded guilty to voter fraud. The couple admitted they illegally
claimed an address within the 40th District in order to vote for Rizzo. Two individuals who
committed voter fraud swung an entire election.
In December 2015, state Sen. Will Kraus, R-Lee’s Summit, pre-filed legislation that would grant
the Missouri Secretary of State the power to require potential voters to show photo IDs issued by
the government before voting. Concurrently, Missouri lawmakers (largely Republican) were
working on pushing a bill through that would make such a photo-ID requirement law.
Prior to the filing, on the Aug. 30, 2015 episode of This Week in Missouri Politics, Kraus, who is
running for Secretary of State in the November 2016 election, justified such legislation this way:
“There’s over 16 people in the state of Missouri who have been convicted of some type of voter
fraud. That shows people in the state of Missouri are trying to cheat elections.” Had Kraus’ bill
already been law, perhaps the 2010 election in the 40th District would have gone Royster’s way,
and he could have saved several years of effort and $35,000 in legal fees.
Well, maybe. The legislation as Kraus proposed it is more explicitly aimed at stopping voter
impersonation fraud. The fraud committed by the Morentinas to help their nephew probably
wouldn’t have been affected by the law. What they did was an issue of registration, which can be
done via mail and without a photo ID. The proposed legislation focuses primarily on voters who
seek to cast their ballots in person, so that 2010 situation might not have been averted.
NEW ELECTION, SAME MEASURES

3. Cases concerned with increasing requirements for Missouri voters are nothing new in the Show-
Me State. The past decade has seen a barrage of similar measures often crafted by Republicans
and opposed by Democrats.
In June 2006, a voter-ID law was passed and signed into law under Gov. Matt Blunt. It would
have required voters to show a photo ID at the polls. However, in October 2006, the Missouri
Supreme Court struck it down as a breach of the state’s constitutional right to vote. The court
found it a burden, in part because it forced citizens to pay for the cost of obtaining a state ID.
Gov. Jay Nixon fended off a similar bill in June 2011 with a veto, which the state legislature
wasn’t able to override. Republicans returned in 2012 using the approach of a state constitutional
amendment to increase voter-ID requirements. In this case, the ballot question for Missouri
voters focused on whether the state constitution should be amended to adopt the Voter
Protection Act, which would have required voters to show photo ID at the polls. But Cole County
Circuit Judge Pat Joyce ruled such an attempt unconstitutional, and it never made it onto a
ballot.
As it currently stands, Missouri’s voter identification laws are relatively lax. A form of photo ID is
not required, and a person may use a recent bank statement or utility bill as identification
instead. And if no other paperwork is present, a person might still be able to vote if two
supervisory poll workers know him or her.
The proposed amendment pushed by Kraus seeks to change this. This measure, which is set to
appear on the Nov. 8 ballot, asks: "Shall the Constitution of Missouri be amended to state that
voters may be required by law, which may be subject to exception, to verify one’s identity,
citizenship, and residence by presenting identification that may include valid government-issued
photo identification?" Another piece of legislation is primarily focused on enforcement of voter
IDs, and according to reporting by KMOX/CBS St. Louis, individuals lacking photo IDs “could
still cast a ballot after signing a statement saying, under penalty of perjury, they don’t have the
required identification and can show some other form of identifying document, such as a utility
bill or paycheck.”
Marvin Overby, a political science professor at MU, says measures to tighten voter-ID regulations
are almost entirely about political showmanship. “Democrats and Republicans consciously
exaggerate their positions not in the real hopes of finding any policy solution to the issue, but to
rev up support among their base constituencies,” Overby says. In his mind, Republicans tend to
overemphasize the amount of voter fraud and Democrats dramatize how many individuals are
impacted by such legislation.

4. Arizona State University’s News21, a Carnegie-Knight reporting effort, analyzed 2,068 cases of
reported voter fraud nationwide from 2000 to 2012 and found 10 cases of voter impersonation
fraud. The Washington Post reported, “With 146 million registered voters in the United States,
those represent about one for every 15 million prospective voters.”
MOVING AWAY FROM MISSOURI
Legislative pushes to address voter fraud are a relatively new phenomenon, jumpstarted by the
2008 U.S. Supreme Court case Crawford v. Marion County Election Board. A 6-3 decision ruled
that an Indiana law requiring photo IDs to vote did not violate the U.S. Constitution.
In the eight years that followed, 34 states passed some form of voter identification law. For
instance, in Montana there is the minimal requirement to show some form of ID, but in Texas it
is an absolute necessity.
In those states where an ID is required, if one is not presented, individuals can often cast a
provisional ballot. Essentially, these ballots are issued when a voter’s identity is in question and
they must be verified within a set amount of time, often a week. To verify his or her provisional
ballot, a voter must return to his or her municipal clerk with the proper identification, as
determined by state law.
One issue with provisional ballots is that they often take more time to fill out than the typical
ballot. More importantly, such ballots often stack up and are never sifted through again. After
California’s primary on June 7, some 2.4 million ballots were left uncounted at the end of the
same week. According to the Los Angeles Times, “A portion of the unprocessed total are
provisional ballots.” Per Los Angeles County Registrar, County Clerk Dean Logan reported that
about 85–90 percent of provisional ballots are counted and ultimately validated.
In Missouri, Secretary of State Jason Kander’s report on the proposed legislation, House Bill
1073, asserted that less than 30 percent of provisional ballots cast in the 2012 presidential
election were counted. In that same election cycle, The Election Assistance Commission found
Voting Laws Map
INFOGRAPHIC BY JARED MCNETT AND MADALYNE BIRD

5. that the Missouri rate for counting ballots was higher than 22 other states and was significantly
higher than the national rate of 24.1 percent of rejected provisional ballots.
North Carolina’s solution to the provisional ballot problem was clear-cut. Per a 2013 Winston-
Salem Journal article, “voters will no longer have their votes counted if they use a provisional
ballot outside their correct precinct.” Voting outside of a preassigned sector is one factor that
often leads to a provisional ballot. Additionally, the 2013 North Carolina voter ID law, passed by
a Republican-majority General Assembly, cut down on early voting, did away with same-day
registration, banned out-of-precinct voting and put an end to preregistration for 16- and 17-year-
olds.
In April 2016, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Schroeder (a 2007 President George W. Bush
appointee), upheld the law and pushed back against arguments from the North Carolina NAACP
and the Justice Department by ruling the plaintiffs “failed to show that such disparities will have
materially adverse effects on the ability of minority voters to cast a ballot and effectively exercise
the electoral franchise.” (On June 21, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit considered the
case to reverse Judge Schroeder’s ruling.)
Even when such laws are struck down, some states continue to challenge judicial decsions. Texas
is one of those states. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, “the 5th Circuit Court of
Appeals unanimously affirmed a federal trial court’s earlier finding that Texas’ strict photo ID law
violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.” But, Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton
has continued to challenge the case.
Although it’s tempting to paint these voter-ID laws in partisan strokes as purely Republican
inventions, passage does reach across the aisle. In 2011 in Rhode Island, then-Gov. Lincoln
Chaffee signed a voter-ID bill, which had been passed by a Democratic legislature, into law. Since
the bill’s passage, opponents have pointed to cases of voter disenfranchisement and argued that it
impacts Rhode Island’s growing Latino population.
Speaking with WGBH-Boston, Pablo Rodriguez of the Rhode Island Latino Political Action
Committee argued that the move was made by “incumbents that are concerned about the number
of Latinos moving into their districts and threatening their own positions as legislators.”

6. WHO IS IMPACTED?
Although there are notable outliers when it comes to the supposed partisanship of such bills, the
blatancy of minority voter-disenfranchisement is consistent across states. A University of
California-San Diego research study, “Voter Identification Laws and the Suppression of Minority
Votes,” found that “strict photo identification laws have a differentially negative impact on the
turnout of Hispanics, blacks, and mixed-race Americans in primaries and general elections.”
The model developed by the study’s authors, Zoltan Hajnal, Nazita Lajevardi and Lindsay
Nielson, focused on turnout in elections between 2008 and 2012 and used the validated vote
from Cooperative Congressional Election Studies (CCES). Their model compared individual
turnout in states with strict voter-ID laws (states that require a photo ID to cast a regular ballot)
to individual turnout in other states after “controlling for other state level electoral laws that
encourage or discourage participation.” The authors also considered the election context by state
and district as well as demographic characteristics that impacted elections.
In their model, general election Latino turnout was predicted to be 10.3 points lower in states
with strict photo-ID regulations than in states without such restrictions. For multiracial
Americans, turnout was 12.8 points lower under strict photo-ID laws. Naturalized citizens were
12.7 percent less likely to vote in general elections and 3.6 percent less likely to vote in primaries
in strict photo-ID states. “We had a gut instinct that voter-ID laws had an effect,” Lajevardi says.
“Voter requirement laws traditionally over the past couple of centuries have had stark, negative
effects.”
Outside of ethnic and racial minorities, individuals across platforms appear to be stymied by
voter-ID laws. According to the model, Democratic turnout drops by “an estimated 7.7
percentage points in general elections when strict photo identification laws are in place.” The
hypothesized decline for Republicans is about 4.6 percent. Additionally, photo-ID laws are linked
to a reduction in voter turnout in primaries of Americans without high school degrees.
Checking IDs
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY RYAN BERRY AND ASHLEY REESE

7. Even knowing the negative impacts of voter-ID laws, Lajevardi still understands the reason
legislators attempt to pass them. “Proponents of these laws contend that these laws are useful
because they deter fraud and these laws are ensuring that we don’t have voter fraud,” she says.
“They’re not wrong in caring about voter fraud, but actually there’s no research to support that
these laws have any impact on voter fraud.”
Based on what Lajevardi has researched, she believes that the ballot amendment in Missouri, if
passed, would be among the strictest photo ID laws in the country. The research and data that
she used to come to that conclusion comes from the National Conference of State Legislature’s
website.
Some Missouri voters believe the law will pass when it appears on ballots Nov. 8 because
Missouri generally favors conservatism. They feel as if the amendment will pass partially because
of the notion that people need identification for nearly everything.
State Sen. Kraus echoes this sentiment and says that in today’s society, everyone has an ID. “You
need an ID to buy tobacco, alcohol, to get Sudafed, cash a check and open a bank account,” Kraus
says. “You have to have a photo ID.”
Although the measure exempts individuals with disabilities, those born prior to 1946 and those
with religious objections to being photographed, the Kander report estimates that some 220,000
people could be impacted by such a law. 2012 figures from the Missouri Secretary of State office
approximate there are 4.19 million registered voters in Missouri.
Missouri college students attempting to use university IDs to vote would be included in this
number because such IDs would not be valid under the law. The measure also says that the state
will pay for IDs and any source documents needed to obtain them (a lesson learned from the
failed 2006 voter-ID bid). Such fees are one of several issues opponents of voter-ID laws raise,
comparing them to “poll-taxes,” a comparison that is also intended to evoke minority voter
discrimination of the past.
In the present, as well as the very near future, questions about identification for Missouri voters
still linger. Does the need to ensure the integrity of a fundamental democratic process outweigh
the possibility of marginalized citizens being further marginalized? Is a "yes" vote on Nov. 8
worth all the legal challenges and tie-ups that could take place down the road? What will the
future effects of such a measure be?
Is a utility bill or verbal confirmation of identity from election officials enough? Considering this
question is being asked in the Show-Me State months from the day of the vote, the final answer
could well be no.

8. A 10-year history of voter ID battles
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