The morning paper published an article in the print edition the other day from New York Times' partner, Texas Tribune, titled Analysis: A Missing Piece in the Voter ID Debate in which Ross Ramsey says that a half million Texas registered voters "did not have the credentials needed to cast ballots under the new requirement."
The requirements do present a roadblock to those without the underlying documentation. I know that first hand from having helped an elderly individual whose driver's license had expired get a Texas photo ID. But we got it. And there are bound to be others in that category. But half a million? That seems like a stretch.
So maybe there's something missing from the Tribune article. Specifically, how many of those registered voters are actually U.S. citizens?
In the state of Texas a juror must be a U.S. citizen. It's possible that many non-citizens get called for jury duty, and therefore, before a jury panel is selected all the prospective jurors are invited to go tell the judge if they are ineligible, non-citizenship being one of the accepted excuses. It's their responsibility to report their ineligibility to the judge. But the fact that this procedure is part of jury duty tells us there must have been many instances in which in non-citizens got called in for jury duty. That tells us that the government records haven't weeded them out. Could they have gotten the jury summons because they were registered voters?
WashingtonPost.com may have an answer. See Could non-citizens decide the November election? There, Jesse Richman and David Earnest provided some educated speculation that non-citizen voters, who generally vote Democrat, could have swayed some close elections.
So before dumping the Texas voter ID laws based on what the Texas Tribune reports, let's add a step and ascertain whether those people without IDs are American citizens.
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