Anchia and Berman Spoiled My Surprise

HB 218 passed to engrossment yesterday night, on a nearly party-line vote; Reps. Jones and Merritt were the two dissenters from the Republican majority. We'll hopefully have a link to the bill as amended some time today, though considering the not-so-hot job the Lege's web site did yesterday keeping up with the bill's progress, I'm not holding my breath. (I do have to say, though, looking up Davis' Amendment 14 yesterday, and getting the text of what was actually Amendment 13, gave me quite the shock until I noticed who had signed his name on the scanned amendment form and realized it was the wrong amendment. Man, you gotta watch out for those jokesters at the Lege...)

I was hoping to have a discussion on how the typically poorly worded bill created ridiculous loopholes in the election code, but it looks like Reps. Anchia and Berman beat me to the punch. As Eye on Williamson reported yesterday, Berman pointed out that the bill did not substantively change the requirements to vote if one does not have a voter registration card. Previously, you would have to present a form of ID that Election Code 63.0101 listed as "acceptable as proof of identification." That list included photo and non-photo IDs that you could use in case you didn't have your card. Under HB 218, the clause in election code to vote without a registration card remains, now simply stating that one must be able to verify the voter's identity "from the proof presented;" however, the ID lists have been split, with the photo ID list stating that those are "acceptable form[s] of photo identification," but the second non-photo ID list stating, as the full list did before, that those are "acceptable as proof of identification." Seeing as there is no other standard explicitly stated for "proof of identification" elsewhere, it would seem that to vote without a photo ID, one should simply "forget" their voter registration card, and supply one form of non-photo ID from the given list. If you think this circumvents the entire point of the bill, it would seem that Eye on Williamson — and I — agree with you.

Rep. Anchia gave the second half of that one-two punch in his closing statements last night. He noted that if stricter protections against voter fraud were the intent of HB 218, allowing employee IDs as photo identification is not the way to do it. How many employers are there in Texas? How many different employee IDs are we expecting to be able to train elections staff to recognize? As Rep. Anchia stated,

...you can go down to Kinko's and have a bogus little ID made and say that you're an employee of whatever organization you want to be for about five dollars. In fact, this bill, rather than increasing the integrity of elections, makes sure that there's s a huge loophole that you can drive a train through to increase voter fraud.

Rep. Anchia also pointed out that HB 218 does nothing for voter fraud in votes by mail, which just happen to be the only instances of voter fraud the Attorney General even attempted to prosecute in his failed tilt at windmills last year. The one amendment that would have actually significantly impacted any actual voter fraud occurring, offered by Rep. Strama, which sought to increase the ability to prosecute fraud under the laws we have now — very apropos, considering that the bill's sponsor cited lack of resources to prosecute voter fraud as the reason that no one could present one example of it — was tabled by the same Republican majority that passed this bill.

Rep. Anchia's statement was pithy and well-spoken; I'll end with his remarks here:

So, ladies and gentlemen, you have a pig on your hands. It's an ugly bill. It creates more of an opportunity for voter fraud than current law, and I will tell you that if you vote for this without any commensurate enforcement like what was offered up in Representative Strama's bill, you are voting for a pig with no lipstick, and it's going to be nasty.