Pass voter ID law in Utah

The ACLU was fighting a losing battle against Indiana's voter ID law the minute it decided to claim that voter fraud is not a serious threat to American democracy.

The U.S. Supreme Court saw through that one, ruling 6-3 to uphold Indiana's law requiring voters to present a photo ID before casting a ballot. The majority opinion was written by Justice John Paul Stevens, a liberal who might have been expected to side with the ACLU and the Democratic Party, which opposed the law.

Given the surge in digital-age identity theft, Utah ought to now consider a similar law to protect elections here.

Election fraud has been a constant in U.S. history virtually from the start. As recently as a decade ago, a House oversight committee found at least 1,000 illegally cast votes in a 1996 California congressional race where the margin of victory was a mere 984 votes. A Miami mayoral election was found to have included votes from several people who sent in absentee ballots, despite being dead. Biographers have presented strong evidence that Lyndon B. Johnson stole his election to the Senate in 1949.

People persist in attempting election fraud because so much power and influence are at stake. There is no reason to believe that urge has waned.

Indiana's law provides ways for voters to cast ballots even if they have no driver's license. The state will issue a voting ID. Voters also can cast a provisional ballot, then go to a county courthouse within 10 days and present an ID.

Opponents claim such laws discourage the poor and elderly from voting. Those people also tend to vote Democrat. But during the last election in Indiana, in which the law was in effect, Democrats took control of the state House and won three congressional seats.

Of course, recruiting people to vote several times under assumed names is a tedious and labor-intensive way to steal an election. It's much more effective to buy the cooperation of a corrupt election judge or to find a way to rig electronic voting machines. But those methods are difficult to pursue without the cooperation of people on the inside, and there are internal safeguards that must be overcome.

Requiring identification at a polling place is not fool-proof. People can forge identification, just as they can steal Social Security numbers. But those things take effort, too. Voter ID laws present one more obstacle to fraud.

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