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What’s wrong with voter identification?

The perennial issue is making its way back to the front of the public debate again. Former Gov. Paul LePage has revived his longstanding advocacy on the policy as we accelerate towards November’s election.

Predictably, the proponents and opponents have divided neatly into their partisan camps on the issue.

But here’s a little secret: the law already sorta, kinda requires Voter ID.

When you go to register to vote in Maine for the first time, you need to show evidence of both your identity and your residence. Once you are registered, you only need to show evidence of your new residency if you are changing your vote.

That is one reason why arguments against voter ID are a little perplexing. To get onto the voter rolls in the first place, you need to present some type of ID. There are a pretty broad range of things which count as ID.  

Is it really that much of a burden to simply apply the same rules at ballot time?  

The reality is that there probably aren’t huge swaths of individual voter fraud occurring anywhere in Maine. And if there is, it probably won’t be stopped simply by adding an ID requirement.

If anyone is going to attempt large scale fraud, they will likely adhere to Stalin’s infamous quote. In short, it doesn’t matter who votes; what matters is who counts the vote.  

Stalin was speaking from the perspective of a rising Communist leader who later became a dictator. There was only one party in the Soviet Union and whoever played internal politics the best could rise to the top.  

That said, prevention has merit all its own. We’ve spent the last two years singing the praise of coronavirus vaccines and the importance of receiving one – prevention – even if the danger to you and your loved ones is low.  

But take something less dramatic. The exact same logic applies to the annual flu vaccine. Most people are going to be perfectly fine regardless of whether or not they get the flu vaccine. Yet prevention is still wise.

The same is true of voter ID.

While policymaking by poll is an inherently fraught prospect, there is a degree of wisdom in the approach when dealing with trust in the very legitimacy of the system. Voter ID is wildly-popular; polls in both 2016 and 2021 showed 80 percent of Americans supported the policy.  

The retort will inevitably be that other voting law changes are popular, too. That is true. But most of those changes deal with the process of voting. There can be legitimate debate on those issues, even against the weight of popular opinion.  

But identification rules go to the public’s trust and confidence in the system itself. That means popular views should carry greater weight.

We are very fortunate in Maine. Our widely-dispersed population – with dedicated town clerks helping manage relatively small communities – creates a built in firewall against hijinx. Real, physical paper ballots provide a tangible audit trail should anyone have questions or a recount arise.

As we catapult toward what appears to be a massively consequential 2024 presidential election, adding a little bit of extra protection to our voting system seems wise. Even if its effect is completely psychological for a subset of Mainers, it is worthwhile.  

And where we already require people to prove their identity in order to register to vote, merely asking them to bring along the same document when they go to cast a ballot is not an unreasonable burden.

Now, about those electronic voting tabulators in ranked-choice elections …

Michael Cianchette is a Navy reservist who served in Afghanistan. He is in-house counsel to a number of businesses in southern Maine and was a chief counsel to former Gov. Paul LePage. More by Michael Cianchette, Opinion columnist