By Denise Ross

Via some glitch in the matrix, Google news alerts trolled up an NYT report from 2005 quoting Tom Daschle on his distaste for voter ID.

When I got the alert, I assumed it was one of many stories being written about the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding Indiana’s requirement that voter’s present a photo ID at the polls (similar to SD’s own voter ID law).

Since Democrats are tsk-tsking the court ruling and Republicans are celebrating it, I doubt Daschle’s opinion has changed since 2005, when an apparently unnamed commission headed by James Baker and Jimmy Carter convened to study ways to reform America’s voting process.

The commission, too, supported voter ID. Daschle dissented:

For some, the commission’s ID proposal constitutes nothing short of a modern-day poll tax.

I can’t quite see Daschle’s point. Requiring a photo ID - or a signed affidavit in SD’s case - is a barrier for some people. And let’s be frank, these are people so poor and isolated that the ubiquitous photo ID of modern life has managed to elude them. So it’s a barrier for poor people, many of whom belong to the racial minorities who were the targets of poll taxes of yore.

So I get the inspiration for Daschle’s comparison. And I agree the photo ID is a barrier, but I don’t see it as the very high barrier of a poll tax.

The practical effect will be a new component to voter registration drives - asking, Do you have a photo ID? Could that, perhaps, be an “unintended consequence” that helps some of these folks in the long run?

Or do you think the photo ID requirement has no redeeming value?

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