This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
As a voter-suppression tactic, the latest bill to come out of a Utah Legislature interim committee is fairly weak tea. As part of a growing trend by state governments to reduce the number of citizens who can vote, it is just another sign that our elected servants want to limit the number of people who can fire them.
Acting once again in fear of an imaginary threat of voter fraud, the Legislature's Government Operations and Political Subdivisions Interim Committee last week advanced a bill that would direct county elections officials to watch who fails to vote in two consecutive elections and send them a letter. If they don't reply, and they miss two more general elections, the county officials would be required to remove those voters' names from the rolls.
Compared to some other legislative acts, in Utah and other states (most of them controlled by Republicans), this measure is not all that severe. An argument could be made that, if a voter hasn't been motivated to exercise his or her franchise in four straight general elections, what's being taken away is something they didn't value very much to begin with.
But such an argument, no matter how valid logically, is fatally flawed, both constitutionally and ethically.
The right to vote is the basic tool of citizenship. A use-it-or-lose-it standard is an idea that belongs in a class with poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses and other tactics designed to discourage voting.
And, with Utah's legislative and congressional districts so severely gerrymandered that a lot of reasonable people will often skip voting out of a belief that it won't matter, it seems a devilishly effective one. Just keep enough elections in enough districts a foregone conclusion and, should the day ever dawn that a close election turns on voter turnout, many suddenly interested citizens may find themselves barred from the polls, just when their voice would matter the most.
Earlier this month, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School was out with a list of state actions designed to deny voting rights to people without government-issued photo IDs, without clear documentation of citizenship or who didn't get around to registering to vote well in advance of Election Day.
These people — as many as 5 million of them — tend to be poor, minorities, non-property owners, elderly or otherwise on the margins of the body politic to begin with. They don't drive, they don't fly, they don't regularly enter government buildings, so they may be a little light on the identity papers.
None of that should deny anyone their right to vote. Even if it is the first time in a decade they've been moved to do so.