Pawlenty puts election bills in Catch 22

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Pawlenty puts election bills in Catch 22

Article by: Lori Sturdevant
Updated: May 22, 2009 - 12:25 PM

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Gov. Tim Pawlenty vetoed one elections bill Friday, and said earlier this week that he has another in his veto sights. He claims they share one defect: Neither left the House floor with Republican support. That makes them "partisan bills," he says.

It also means those worthy measures are caught in a Catch-22 trap. Those bills lacked GOP votes because some House Republicans are intent on requiring Minnesota voters to show a photo ID card before being allowed to vote -- so much so, that they urged their GOP cohorts to withhold support from any elections bill that did not include such a provision.

The irony: No election law proposal in the country divides more nearly along partisan lines than requiring voters to show a photo ID at the polls. Republicans say it's necessary to combat fraudulent voting, which they believe is epidemic. Democrats counter, "what fraud?" and point to the dearth of evidence of wrongful voting, even when an election is as closely scrutinized as has been the 2008 Minnesota U.S. Senate race. Democrats say they are trying to preserve the franchise for the estimated 10 percent of eligible voters around the country, many of them elderly women and residents of inner cities, who lack photo IDs.

Adding a photo ID requirement would have made this year's elections bills truly partisan. Yet the House GOP strategy gives the governor an opportunity to claim a partisan tilt to two bills that, respectively, would make voter registration automatic with driver's license applications, and absentee ballot procedures less cumbersome and error-prone. The first bill already bears his veto stamp. The second should not.

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