Posted on June 9, 2014

The Biggest Non-Story in Tuesday’s Elections? Mississippi Voter ID Implemented With No Problems

Hans von Spakovsky and Jameson Broggi, Daily Signal, June 6, 2014

It wasn’t the biggest story following Tuesday’s elections in various states, but it was the biggest and most-ignored non-story.

Mississippi’s new voter ID law got its first run in the June 3 primary, and the sky did not fall. Despite the tiresome and disproved claims by opponents that such laws cause wholesale voter disenfranchisement and are intended to suppress votes, Mississippi “sailed through” its first test of the new ID requirements, according to The Clarion Ledger, the newspaper of Jackson, Miss.

Aside from being able to use any form of government-issued photo ID, like every other state with ID requirements, Mississippi provides a free ID for anyone who does not already have a government-issued photo ID. Contrary to the claims of those who say large numbers of Americans don’t have an ID, Mississippi estimated that only 0.8 percent of Mississippians lacked an ID.  In fact, even that may have been an overestimate since the state had to issue only about 1,000 voter ID cards. All those who forgot their ID on Tuesday also could vote by an affidavit as long as they returned and showed an ID within five days.

{snip} Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann said the state “devoted countless hours of time and training to election officials across the state” and the result was that there were hardly any complaints. There was only one reported case of a man mistakenly being turned away for lack of an ID, at which point an election commissioner was sent to solve the problem. {snip}

As Sid Salter from the Clarion Ledger put it, the voter ID law was a “non-event” and “voters expressed little, if any, inconvenience at the polls due to the new law.” {snip}