Ethan Bronner Discusses the \'Core Issue\' About Voting

September 24, 2012, 5:25 pm

By MARGARET SULLIVAN

When I wrote recently about the problem of “false balance” in news stories, I quoted the national legal affairs correspondent Ethan Bronner, whose Sept. 9 story was criticized by some readers.

Those readers believed - and I agree - that his story should have included a clear statement that there is virtually no evidence of in-person voter fraud.

But in quoting one of Mr. Bronner's statements, I got his words right but misrepresented what he was getting at. He later told me so, and I asked him if he'd like to provide that clarification to readers.

Here it is:

Margaret,

In your column about false balance, you quote me (accurately) as saying of in-person voter fraud that while there is no evidence that it exists, it is “not the core issue.” Some readers said it sure seemed like the core issue to them. But as I had said to you originally, while both sides have been fighting about voter ID, a much bigger issue is the failure of both parties to address the country's appallingly low voter registration. Some 51 million voting age Americans, about a quarter of the voting age population, are not registered to vote. We lack a national voter roll which every other advanced (and many not so advanced) country has. Instead we have 13,000 such rolls which vary in accuracy and ease. When voters move, which they do often in this country, they must register anew. While it is certainly true, as I made clear in my front-page story from Pennsylvania in July, that voter ID requirements will disproportionately affect the poor and minority groups who vote more for Democrats than Republicans, the percentage of REGISTERED v oters who lack the needed ID appears low. One survey from 2008 show that 90 percent of whites who are registered to vote have the needed ID and 85 percent of blacks who are registered to vote do as well. When advocates say that 750,000 people in Pennsylvania lack the Department of Transportation-approved ID there, what goes unsaid is that perhaps 650,000 to 700,000 of them are not even registered to vote so the ID question at polling stations is moot.

I wrote a story about this that appeared on July 31st and quoted Robert Pastor of the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University saying it this way: “The proponents of voter ID are adamant that it is essential to stop electoral fraud even though there is hardly any evidence of voter impersonation, and the opponents are sure that it will lead to voter suppression even though they haven't been able - until Pennsylvania - to point to a single instance where a voter could not vote because of a lack of ID,” he said. “I did a survey of Indiana, Maryland, and Mississippi and found only about 1.2 percent of registered voters did not have photo IDs. The problem remains registration - not IDs - in reducing voting participation. To quote Jorge Luis Borges on the Falklands war, ‘It's a fight between two bald men over a comb.'”

Even if he slightly overstates his case (there are other scholars who say he does), his point seems to me very significant and it was the point I was trying to make in my conversation with you.

Ethan