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AP: Officials: First vote under Kansas ID law was smooth
Published 1/12/2012 in News
TOPEKA (AP) — The first election in Kansas under a state law requiring voters to show photo identification appears to have gone smoothly, but officials debated Wednesday whether the sales tax vote in a small southwestern Kansas town was a valid test of the new rule.
Voters in Cimarron overwhelmingly approved a 1.25 percent sales tax to finance a new municipal swimming pool for the community of 2,200 residents about 175 miles west of Wichita. About 460 people voted, with 18 casting provisional ballots that won't be counted until the county clerk's office confirms their eligibility to participate.
Gray County Clerk Bonnie Swartz said most of the voters casting provisional ballots had moved to a new address since they had last voted. Only one person cast a provisional ballot because she didn't have a valid photo ID, and Swartz said the voter had declined to bring one.
"She's against voter ID, so it's a protest," Swartz said in a telephone interview, declining to name the voter because the identities of people who cast provisional ballots aren't public.
The law took effect Jan. 1, having been enacted at the urging of Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who argued that the measure will prevent voter fraud. Kobach traveled to Cimarron to observe the voting.
"It went very smoothly, without a hiccup," he said. "It didn't significantly delay the process at all."
Critics of such measures worry that they will suppress voter turnout. Last month, the U.S. Justice Department blocked a South Carolina voter ID law.
Kansas also has a law that will require people registering to vote for the first time in the state to provide proof that they're U.S. citizens, such as a passport or birth certificate. It takes effect Jan. 1, 2013, but Kobach wants to move the date up more than six months, to June 15, putting it in effect ahead of this year's presidential election.
The Kansas House Elections Committee agreed Wednesday to sponsor the measure.
Meanwhile, Kobach and other supporters of the photo ID law said Cimarron's experience showed the requirement isn't likely to decrease turnout. In Cimarron the turnout was nearly 40 percent, unusually high for a local election; final, unofficial results showed 355 people, or nearly 77 percent, voting yes, and 109, or 23 percent, voting no.
State law lists eight forms of photo ID that are valid at the polls. Swartz said voters in Cimarron used driver's licenses, military IDs, passports and their public school staff IDs.
"People aren't having a hard time meeting the standard," said Kansas House Elections Committee Chairman Scott Schwab, an Olathe Republican.
Some legislators and even Swartz questioned whether voting in a more populous area would give election officials a better indication of any potential problems. Cimarron has a single polling place, a 4-H building about a quarter of a mile from town, and officials had expected most voters to drive there — with their licenses serving as a valid photo ID under the law.
"I think most people in Cimarron would carry driver's licenses and everybody would know everybody," said Senate President Steve Morris, a Hugoton Republican. "I'm not sure that it would be an adequate test."
Kobach and Schwab also argued that the Cimarron election was a good test for the photo ID law because Kansans in urban and suburban areas are used to carrying photo ID everywhere and producing it for routine transactions in stores and banks for employees they don't know.
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