Mississippi should adopt voter ID
Published 10:48pm Saturday, August 8, 2009If any area of Mississippi should support making voter identification a mandatory practice, Southwest Mississippi should.
In almost every election, allegations of voter fraud bubble up. The most recent case in Wilkinson County dragged on for months and months and sparked investigations from all sorts of sources.
Mississippi’s voting system should be above reproach. At the moment, it’s not. In fact, it’s a sinister looking man lurking through a dark alley.
By not requiring a voter to show identification to prove his identity, catching people who lie in order to vote illegally is difficult at best.
Federal laws require employers to fill out forms when hiring a worker to ensure the employer has examined forms of identification in an effort to prove the employee is, in fact, a legal resident of the United States.
But the State of Mississippi thinks that federal practice is too restrictive for what is arguably the most important thing a citizen can do — vote.
Instead of moving to get rid of the holes in our current system that encourage voter fraud, our state has chosen to remain stuck in the past — mostly out of fear that a voter ID requirement would harm black voting turnout.
That notion at one time had merit. Not so long ago the system — run solely by whites — was manipulated to minimize the rights of black citizens. But that system has changed. Today, Adams County has two of five county supervisors who are black. Exactly half of the city’s aldermen are black and approximately half of our area’s judges are black, too.
The fears that voter ID would be a return to days of the oppressive Jim Crow era, those fears can — and should — be eliminated through bi-partisan efforts to put the voter ID matter on the ballot and then educate the public on how helpful and harmless voter ID laws can be.
