JEFFERSON CITY | The Missouri House gave final approval today to a controversial constitutional amendment concerning voter ID.
The amendment would give lawmakers the authority to pass legislation requiring voters to show photo identification before being allowed to cast a ballot. As a constitutional amendment, the measure would have to be approved by voters in order to go into effect.
The proposal now moves on to the Senate, where it must be passed before next Friday in order to go on the November ballot.
The issue cleaves sharply along political lines – Republicans argue voter ID requirements are necessary to prevent voter fraud while Democrats say the effort is aimed at disenfranchising poorer voters who are more inclined to vote their way.
Republican lawmakers raised the issue this week in wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision late last month upholding voter ID requirements in Indiana. Missouri passed a voter ID law in 2006, but the state Supreme Court overturned it within a few months.
The constitutional change under discussion now would nullify the basis of the 2006 decision, allowing the legislature to require voters to show ID in the future.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Robin Carnahan appeared in St. Louis this afternoon with a group called Missourians for Fair Elections to speak out against voter ID laws. If approved, an ID requirement could "put the voting rights at risk for up to 240,000 registered Missouri voters," according to a press release from Missourians for Fair Elections.
I think this answers a couple of my questions
In http://primebuzz.kcstar.com/?q=node/11596#comment-20171 I asked if anyone knew whether the bill was real or not. This article seems to imply that it is real and moving forward.
It also provides Carnahan’s (admittedly a biased party) estimate that up to 240,000 voters could be affected by the law. Though I would be interested in knowing how that figure was derived, I’d have to think that it is many orders of magnitude greater than the number of voters crossing state lines as brought up in the other thread.