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Copyright 2008 The Columbia Daily Tribune

 May 13, 2008 Tuesday

LENGTH: 746 words

BYLINE: The New York Times

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A proposal approved by a Missouri Senate committee yesterday would require proof of citizenship from anyone registering to vote. The legislation, which would put a proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot as early as August, allows far more rigorous demands than the Indiana voter ID requirement recently upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. Indiana's law requires voters to prove their identity with a government-issued card.

Sponsors of the Missouri amendment say it is part of an effort to prevent illegal immigrants from affecting the political process. Critics say the measure could lead to the disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of legal residents who would find it difficult to prove their citizenship.

Voting experts say the Missouri amendment represents the next logical step for those who have supported stronger voter ID requirements and the next battleground in how elections are conducted. Similar measures requiring proof of citizenship are being considered in at least 19 state legislatures. Only in Missouri does the requirement have a chance of taking effect before the presidential election.

In Arizona, the only state that requires proof of citizenship to register to vote, more than 38,000 voter registration applications have been thrown out since the state adopted its measure in 2004. That number was included in election data obtained through a lawsuit filed by voting rights advocates and provided to The New York Times. More than 70 percent of those registrations came from people who said under oath they were born in the United States, the data indicated.

Already, 25 states, including Missouri, require some form of identification at the polls. Seven of those states require or can request photo ID, and more might soon follow suit now that the Supreme Court has upheld the practice. Democrats have criticized these requirements as implicitly intended to keep lower-income voters from the polls and are likely to fight even more fiercely now that the requirements are expanding to include immigration status.

Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan, a Democrat who opposes the measure, estimated it could disenfranchise as many as 240,000 registered voters who would be unable to prove their citizenship.

Measures requiring proof of citizenship raise the bar higher because they offer few options for documentation. In most cases, aspiring voters would have to produce an original birth certificate, naturalization papers or a passport. The face of Missouri drivers licenses note whether a driver is a citizen.

Critics say when documentation of citizenship is applied to voting, it becomes more difficult for the poor, disabled, elderly and minorities to participate in the political process.

"Everyone has been focusing on voter ID laws generally, but the most pernicious measures and the ones that really promise to prevent the most eligible voters from voting is what we see in Arizona and now in Missouri," said Jon Greenbaum, a former voting rights official at the Department of Justice and now the director of the voting rights project at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a liberal advocacy group.

Aside from its immediacy, the proposal in Missouri is important because it has been a crucial swing state in recent presidential elections, with outcomes often decided by a razor-thin margin.

Supporters of the measures cite growing concerns that illegal immigrants will try to vote. They say proof of citizenship is important to improve the accuracy of registration rolls and the overall voter confidence in the process.

State Rep. Stanley Cox, a Republican from Sedalia and sponsor of the amendment, said the Missouri Constitution already requires voters to be citizens and that his amendment was simply meant to better enforce that requirement.

"The requirements we have right now are totally inadequate," Cox said. "You can present a utility bill, and that doesn't prove anything. I could sit here with my nice photocopier and create a thousand utility bills with different names on them."

In 2006, the Missouri legislature passed a photo identification bill that the state Supreme Court later ruled unconstitutional because it placed too much of a burden on voters. That ruling spurred state lawmakers to try to change the constitution.

The proposed amendment does not require the governor's signature but would need to be approved by the voters in the state's August primary to take effect before the presidential election.

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LOAD-DATE: May 13, 2008