We are not a big fan of Senate Bill 14, the state's new voter photo ID law. There's nothing inherently wrong with its premise, but it seeks to solve a nonexistent problem, and it will make voting more difficult for hundreds of thousands of otherwise qualified Texans.
For that reason, we were elated to see that the Martin Luther King Jr. Recreation Center Advisory Board will sponsor a voter identification forum at 7:30 p.m. Dec. 6 at the center, which is at 1300 Wilson St.
Mary C. Taylor, a member of the advisory board, told the Record-Chronicle's Bj Lewis that more than 600,000 otherwise qualified voters in Texas don't have the state-issued photo identification card that now must be shown before voting. It's a safe bet that some of them live in Denton County, and this informational forum can help them out.
Some politician's aide will unload a speech, but the real information will come from a panel of experts representing such entities as the state Department of Public Safety, the agency that will issue the photo ID cards, and the Denton County Elections Office, which will administer the law at county polling places. Also on the panel will be representatives of the League of United Latin American Citizens, the NAACP and the League of Women Voters.
The panelists will answer questions about the new law and assist those present who need to apply for a photo ID card.
There are likely to be a lot of them. The most common type of state-issued photo ID card is the driver's license, and most of us tend to think they are ubiquitous. They are not. Many Texans who are otherwise registered and eligible to vote, do not drive for one reason or another and will be disenfranchised unless they obtain a state-issued photo identification card mandated by the new law. Unfortunately, many of these same Texans are poor, old or infirm, and they'll need all the help they can get to re-enter the family of legal voters that they were so unceremoniously kicked out of by SB 14.
Proponents of SB 14 have maintained that its purpose is to cure some diaphanous plague of unqualified voters showing up at the polls, but no one has yet come up with any figures to show that such a plague exists.
The critics of the law claim that the law is a not-so-subtle effort to discourage voting among minorities, the poor and the elderly, many of whom tend to vote Democratic. We don't know about that, but if the Republican-dominated Legislature was serious about attacking Democrat-sponsored voting fraud, they would have done better to take a long, hard look at the abuse of absentee voting procedures, which Democratic Party operatives have depended on for years in some areas of Texas.
It is not an inherently bad idea to require a photo ID at the polls, but one consequence of the new law is to effectively bar a large segment of its qualified residents from the polls unless they obtain the needed documentation. Perhaps not so coincidentally, a large segment of this large segment is made up of poor people who can't afford to drive and people who are too old or too sick to drive - precisely the kind of people who will find it difficult to jump through the hoops that the Legislature has set up.
This is why we don't think SB 14 is a very useful law, and why the MLK Center Advisory Board is doing such a valuable service by sponsoring this forum.
