Letter: No vote is urged on Voter ID amendment

Talk about it

I want to urge everyone to vote no on the Minnesota voter ID amendment.

The Office of the Minnesota Secretary of State indicates that there are 200,000 registered voters that do not have valid photo identification. Will these voters be turned away at the polls? How will absentee ballots be handled? What about the small precincts that practice mail-in-balloting? Will that be still possible? How about student voters or military voters most of whom are not able to travel to their registered precinct to vote? Cost estimates to implement voter ID range from a few million dollars to as much as $100 million. It seems to me as though there are better uses for taxpayers’ funds.

If this amendment passes, it will be up to the Minnesota state legislators to decide how to answer these questions. This will take up valuable Legislature time that would be much better spent addressing other Minnesota issues.

I am certainly not in favor of voter fraud, but we have virtually no evidence of voter fraud in Minnesota. Our voter system has come under severe scrutiny with two high-profile recounts in the last two elections. The recounts have overwhelmingly pointed to a clean and fraud-free election system.

The Voter ID amendment is an attempt to solve a problem that does not exist. Vote “no” to save our legislators valuable time. Vote “no” to save taxpayer money. Vote “no” to protect the voting right of all our registered voters in the state of Minnesota.

Tags: opinion, letters, politics, minnesota