The Voter ID act is a big deal to Robin Carnahan. She's been fighting it for two years, and pulls no punches in looking for creative ways to gather attention. Last year, Carnahan's political allies put together an astroturf campaign paid for by representatives of the local unions. It was glaringly obvious, especially when Carnahan presented union organizer Richard Von Glahn as a typical Missourian who couldn't get a license.
This year, Carnahan is back, using college students this time (one is curious if they planned on voting in Missouri, Illinois, or both), and she has some database information to claim 230,000 Missourians will be disenfranchised with VoterID.
First - that's great. She estimated 240,000 last year, which means 10,000 Missourians were able to find photo identification. More important, we see that Secretary Carnahan has the ability to match voter registrations and driver's license information by individual county.
One should note that the lawsuit by the Justice Department on voter registration was ruled in favor of Robin Carnahan by Nanette Laughrey(pdf) was done so on the basis of it not being the job of the Secretary of State to look at county voting registration lists. Enforcement of those lists was the duty of the local registrars, and as they weren't SoS employees, it wasn't her fault the rolls were bad. At the time, Republicans wanted to know why so many Missouri counties had more registered voters than actual residents. The massive amounts of registrations pushed by groups like ACORN, PROVOTE, and ACT had polluted the voter rolls, creating opportunity for unclean elections. That effort by the voter registration proxy groups has grown each year, with significant problems of fraudulent registrations leading to convictions, and even charges of campaign malfeasance as these groups register people than urge them to vote for Democrats.
Carnahan's office is of course packed with activitists from those groups, starting with her Director of Communications, Laura Egerdal (who we still don't know if she's qualified to hold the post).
It's therefore strange that Carnahan's office, which previously claimed it had no authority to force local registrars to clean up their voting rolls, now cites database mining to buttress her claim that 230,000 Missourians would be unable to vote.
It is likely, in evidence of the fraudulent registrations, the failure to clean up the voting rolls, and the lax standards employed by Secretary of State, that the 230,000 difference between voter registration and driver's license information is primarily made up of illegally registered voters, voters who have moved or died and have not been taken off the rolls, and duplicate entries of information. As Secretary Carnaham claims she can not be held responsible for accurate voting registration across the state, it's a bold statement to then use that same information to claim that Missourians are being disenfranchised.
That's the real story. Carnahan's allies ruin the voting rolls, and then Carnahan uses the bad data to fight against the common sense of using a photograph to make sure a voter is who they say they are.
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