Voter ID laws not needed for extremely rare issue

OUR SECRETARY of state is right. She should not cooperate with the request by Trump’s “Advisory Commission on Election Integrity” to produce voter information, including personally identifiable information of voters, which is protected by law. The commission is actually a self-driving vehicle pre-programmed to arrive at only one destination — that mythical nation (where), according to Trump, hordes of foreigners and people without valid photo identification flood the polls, threatening electoral integrity. In fact, the ultimate goal of the commission proponents is to enact legislation that would suppress the votes of those whom they see as unlikely to vote for Republicans.

The truth is that voting fraud is extremely rare and in-person impersonation fraud — the only kind that would be caught by voter ID laws — is essentially nonexistent, as study after study has shown. Furthermore, we know that this is true in New Mexico as litigation against disgraced former Secretary of State Dianna Duran has shown. In 2011, in support of a bill that would have required voters to show photo IDs, she testified that our state’s electoral system was a “culture of corruption” and that she had records showing that more than three dozen foreign nationals had voted in New Mexico elections. Pursuant to the Inspection of Public Records Act, the ACLU-NM requested the records that supported her claims. After she refused to produce the “proof,” an action was filed to force her to do so. The litigation revealed that there were no such records. Later, in a February 15, 2016, editorial, the Journal correctly characterized Duran’s claims as a “stunt” that was “politically motivated” with “nothing to back it up.”

Many other states have refused to comply with the commission’s disturbing request . ... Our secretary of state should be commended for safeguarding our protected voter information. EDWIN MACY Placitas