Voter ID bills: Aw, it's on.

Remember last week when the Legislature passed a law requiring voters to provide one of several forms of ID at the polls, and Gov. Perdue vetoed it? Similar measures are at various stages of passage and enaction in Wisconsin and Texas, and New Hampshire's governor vetoed one yesterday.

I'm not going to get into a debate about the motivation behind these bills, but I generally oppose them because they're a waste of money. In North Carolina, voting under another person's name or voting more than once is already a felony. In 2010, something like 23 cases of voter fraud were refered to authorities. The most conservative estimates for how much it would cost to issue IDs to the hundreds of thousands of voters who don't have them, train poll workers and enforce the new regulations - the most conservative estimate - was over $1 million. That's in a state that's getting ready to fire thousands of public school teachers and health care workers. For a few dozen instances per election.

Keep in mind that some of the same people who supported the voter ID bill here in N.C. also wanted to cut the early voting period by one week - because they say it's too expensive.

And even in states that do have serious problems with voter fraud, is requiring a piece of paper really going to magically fix them? I'm just remembering that time in college when two of my housemates succesfully used the same fake ID just minutes apart at the same restaurant. Gun rights advocates are constantly telling us that we need to do away with regulations because they don't work anyway. Well, um...

But the biggest argument used against voter ID requirements is that they depress minority turnout, amounting to a modern-day poll tax. Here's the thing... It seems, intuitively, like that should be true, but there isn't enough evidence to say definitively "Yes, this is so." The existing laws just haven't been around long enough to give us the data to work with. For instance, in the first presidential election after Georgia passed its ID law, minority turnout went up dramatically. But, of course, that was the 2008 election when turnout was up across the board.

Which is why I think it's a good thing that several Senators are asking the Justice Department to look at whether these laws really do threaten voting rights. There are enough of these laws on the books or in the works to justify federal-level interest, and the DoJ has resources that your average state legislature doesn't.

I hope that the Department will take this up. And I also hope that its results, whatever theyare, aren't politicized. (Hey, I can dream.) For my fellow progressives, that means this: if the Department of Justice in a Democratic administration finds conclusively that voter ID requirements do not discourage minority voters, then we stop insisting otherwise.