Stricter voting laws are not the answer!

In this blog posted by my colleague, Kyle, on June 27, 2012, he discusses how stricter voting laws, specifically those requiring a valid photo I.D., to vote would be more of a nuisance than an advantage overall. I could not agree more with his post. If we required voters to show a valid form of identification to vote, I think the overall effect would be that less people would show up to vote.

We already have a problem getting people to vote and passing a law like this would only intensify the problem. Like my colleague pointed out, we would have problems getting people to vote who were not able to afford replacing a lost photo I.D and that many people (600,000, as Kyle said) who don’t possess the proper identification to vote would be unable to. I do not think it would cut down on fraud either. It would only cause many eligible Texans to be unable to vote.

What we should be focusing on is how to get more Texans to vote, not ways to restrict them from voting.  In this article posted by Emily Cadik on June 15, 2012, she points out that only 36.4% of eligible voters voted in the 2010 presidential election, which was the lowest turnout in all the states. This is really disappointing and really makes me wonder why we are looking at making voting laws stricter when we can’t even get eligible voters to show up in the first place!  

In my opinion, before we start focusing on how to stop certain groups of people from voting, we need to focus on getting those who are able to vote to do so!