Published: February 09, 2006 04:09 pm      

Fixing voter ID law make sense

MARSHALL LAW

Glad to see the General Assembly is back in session and is taking a second look – and apparently a third and fourth – at that voter identification bill it passed last year. Backers claimed that version of the bill was necessary to prevent voter fraud, so poll workers would know without a shadow of a doubt that a voter is who they say they are, which is great. I’m all for that.

But, the legislation required voters who do not have a current photo ID card – such as a driver’s license – to go get a Georgia ID card that cost around $30. And because the General Assembly only created a handful or two of sites that could manufacture such cards, it retrofitted an old bus to drive around the state, servicing communities that were miles and miles away from these sites.

The trouble with that was the bus kept breaking down, a perfect metaphor for the troubled law.

Voter fraud does happen. It happens in every state. But there is not such an epidemic of it in Georgia that voters should have to seek an ID headquarters and pay to have one made. I think it makes great heaping gobs of sense to require voters to produce a identification card with their photograph on it in order to get a ballot. But the burden of providing these cards should be on the state, not those without cars or the ability to obtain a driver’s license.

A digital camera hooked to a computer and a laminating machine of some kind can’t cost that much. The South has a particularly shady past when it comes to voters’ rights, and we should do all we can as a state to make sure that every registered voter can cast their ballot. Of course getting them to register and then to vote is another matter, but I don’t think that can be legislated. I’m just glad the General Assembly is taking steps to rectify a flawed law that gave the state a black eye in the national media.

Speaking of good moves, it is good news that the Georgia Department of Corrections is relocating its base of operations down the road to Forsyth. The old Tift College campus used to attract my eye every time my family passed it on I-75. When I learned it was closing down soon after I started working here at the paper, I was sad to know it would empty.

Through several false starts as other schools, it seems like the state is moving in and not a moment too soon. Sure, it will be nice to have all those jobs relocated one county south of us. It may help attract new residents for Butts County as well. But anything that state can to do spread government out a bit from downtown Atlanta is going to help traffic that somehow or another impacts all of us, and shares the wealth with outlying areas like ours that could use a little pick-me-up in the wallet.

While it would have been great to have the new headquarters located on Department of Corrections land next to the state prison out on Highway 36, it’s hard to blame the decision makers for their final choice. The facilities, though in need of repair and modernizing, are in place, and it’s very convenient to the rest of the state.

Of course the decision leaves open all that land next to the prison for an airport, which seems like it was on someone’s planning desk a few years ago. Is that in a holding pattern now alongside our bypass?