Legislature shouldn't waste time on voter ID non-issue

In the upcoming legislative session, Texas Republicans are fired-up to push for tougher laws on voter identification, charged by the Supreme Court's April ruling that Indiana laws stating that voters must present a valid, government-issued photo ID at the voting booth was constitutional.

Never mind that almost no cases of voter fraud in Texas, or Indiana for that matter, could have been prevented by voters showing an ID. Last session, voter identification legislation was a divisive partisan nightmare. Democratic senators were running in to vote just as their names were called in order to block stricter legislation, while Republicans huffed about the sanctity of voting and how to protect it.

Almost all of the cases of voter fraud in the past have been the result of misleading absentee ballots, and have nothing to do with identity theft or wrongful voting.

Democrats feel that the stricter laws would make voting more difficult for voters who are likely not to have a government ID. Low income voters, legal immigrants, and, specifically, widowed older women who don't drive would all have a harder time casting their vote. They are all demographics that would likely vote Democratic.

Republicans, on the other hand, feel that it is important to ensure that only people who are supposed to vote in our elections can, even at the cost of making voting harder for some groups of eligible voters.

In a society where so few take part in the political process, it seems unnecessary to hinder voting without cause.

Voting is a right and a privilege that American citizens should partake in more often and in greater numbers, and ensuring that the voting process is accurate is a necessary and worthy goal for lawmakers.

However, tightening restrictions on voter identification will not solve any problems, but it will make minorities, and the elderly feel discriminated against, and will cause legislators to spend yet another session bickering about non-issues, when they should be working on solving actual issues.