The state of voter ID, the Electoral College and the 2016 election
Recent voter ID concerns have centered on legal challenges that affect the 2014 mid-term elections in November. But how does the voter ID landscape look for the next presidential election?
Under the Constitution’s federal election process, voters will choose Senators and Representatives next month in various statewide elections, with the entire House and one-third of the Senate up for re-election. The winners will be the candidates with the most votes in each state. (The passage of the 17th Amendment took away the original power in the Constitution for state legislatures to choose Senators.)
All that seems very simple, and the recent actions by the Supreme Court have clarified, at least for the November elections, voter ID challenges in Texas and Wisconsin. The strict voter ID law in Texas will be in force for the November 2014 election; the strict voter ID law in Wisconsin won’t.
A strict law requires voters to present a photo ID or another acceptable identification at the polls, or they must vote on a provisional ballot and take additional steps after Election Day to present identification.
A non-strict law allows some voters without acceptable identification at the polls to cast a ballot that will be counted, without further action on their part. Various states have provisions for checking on the identities of these voters in different ways.
So what happens to the voter ID controversy after this November? Aside from the challenges in Texas and Wisconsin, the Arkansas supreme court has struck down that state’s strict voter ID law. Pennsylvania also won’t appeal a state judge’s decision that disallowed its 2012 strict ID law.
The Pennsylvania case is interesting because the voter ID clash in the Keystone state was a significant factor during the 2012 election, when Pennsylvania was seen, by some people, as a swing state in the Presidential election. Various legal measures kept the strict voter ID law from going into effect for the race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.
The Supreme Court could very well rule on cases in the several states that have appeals, but a quick look at key swing states in the upcoming 2016 election shows where the controversy over access to the polls will come into play.
The key to recent Presidential elections has been swing states, and the party that controls the majority of votes in these states usually wins the election. A broad list of swing states starts with about 15 contested states, and the list gets smaller as Election Day nears.
Under current laws, strict voter ID laws are in place for 10 states with a total of 133 electoral votes. (A total of 270 or more electoral votes are needed to win the Presidential election.) Of these states, four are considered swing states: Ohio (18 electoral votes), Arizona (11 electoral votes), Indiana (11 electoral votes) and Virginia (13 electoral votes).
Non-strict voter ID laws are in place for 21 states with a total of 152 electoral votes. Swing states in this group include Colorado (9 votes), Florida (29 votes), Michigan (16 votes) and New Hampshire (4 votes).
The remaining states 19 states and the District of Columbia don’t have voter ID laws, and they account for 253 electoral votes. They include the following swing states: Iowa (6 votes), Minnesota (10 votes), Nevada (6 votes), New Mexico (5 votes), North Carolina (15 votes), Pennsylvania (20 votes) and Wisconsin (10 votes).
However, North Carolina will have its strict voter ID law in place by the 2016 election, assuming that no court challenges delay the law’s implementation.
All told, 173 electoral votes would be in play in the 15 projected swing states, with strict voter ID laws affecting states with a total of 68 electoral votes. States with non-strict laws would account for 58 electoral votes, while the swing states with no voter ID laws account for 47 electoral votes.
If Wisconsin wins its court case, it also would go back into the strict voter ID column. But even with the addition of North Carolina and Wisconsin, the “strict ID” states wouldn’t control the majority of swing state electoral votes, falling 10 votes short of a majority.
However, eight new voter ID laws were proposed in 2014 in a group of states that included swing states Iowa and Minnesota. And if Pennsylvania were to revisit its voter ID challenge, the majority of electoral votes in the swing states could tilt toward the states that have strict voter ID laws.
So it seems that the legal and political battle over voter ID laws won’t abate as the next Presidential election approaches.
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