Last fall, Center of the American Experiment issued a report recommending 15 reforms of our state’s election system, informed largely by experiences from the 2008 U.S. Senate election recount.

Through bipartisan effort, the Legislature has passed five of the recommendations into law: moving the primary to an earlier date; providing for barcode technology to bring efficiency to absentee ballot processing; clarifying what ballots should be included in recounts versus court contests; and formalizing processes to count ballots and reconcile ballot numbers. It also passed a law moving in the direction of a sixth recommendation: centralizing absentee ballot processing. This is great progress.

Several legislators deserve to be commended specially for their efforts, including DFL Senators Ann Rest and Katie Sieben, GOP Senator Chris Gerlach, DFL House Members Ryan Winkler and Steve Simon, and GOP House Member Mary Kiffmeyer. Because of their efforts to make sensible administrative and operational changes, Minnesota’s election system will now have increased access, accuracy, privacy and integrity.

As a group, these legislators set aside partisanship and quietly did what was best for Minnesota elections. The DFL lawmakers’ efforts were especially remarkable and laudable, considering vocal opposition to substantive reform from liberal special interest groups like Common Cause, Citizens for Election Integrity in Minnesota and ACORN.

The good election reforms that have recently been passed into law notwithstanding, there is still one major reform that remains to be instituted: requiring voters to present a photo ID to access a ballot.

It is highly suspicious that liberal special interest groups resist injecting this modest measure of integrity into our election system. It is especially suspicious that they cling to our state’s “vouching” system of allowing people to register by showing up at the polls with no proof at all of identity or residence, using only another person to vouch for them. We are lagging behind other states because of this outmoded practice.

In the modern world, ballot access should have at least the same degree of integrity as renting a movie, boarding a commercial airplane, cashing a check or disposing leaves at the county compost site.

Opponents of election integrity often claim that having to produce a photo ID at the polls constitutes an unbearable burden that could cause disenfranchisement and lower voter turnout, especially among elderly or minority citizens. They say this with absolutely no evidence to back up the claim. In fact, there is evidence to the contrary. In Indiana, voter turnout increased after implementation of a photo ID law there a few years ago—by 13 percent in 2006 and another two percent in 2008.

In Minnesota, through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, as the focus in elections moved almost exclusively toward increasing access and away from ensuring integrity, our voter participation rates were high but trending downward. In the 2000s, with increased focus on both access and integrity, voter participation rates increased and hit levels not seen in decades.

This is not an issue of government knowing who is voting; it is a matter of other voters knowing that all the other voters are legitimate.

What photo ID opponents fail to recognize is that people who lack confi dence in the election system see no reason to show up and vote. There is plenty of evidence to support this fact, from across the globe in countries where elections are known to be sham. Conversely, when citizens have confidence in an election system, they are more likely to participate in it.

In addition, former President Jimmy Carter has said that requiring photo ID at the polls will help minority voting, instead of deterring it, echoing a sentiment expressed by Andrew Young, another Democrat and the African-American former mayor of Atlanta. Having a photo ID is a tool of empowerment for operating in everyday life. Certainly Minnesota lawmakers are clever enough to find ways to eliminate any potential barriers that an exceedingly small percentage of citizens who want to vote might have in obtaining a photo ID.

In poll after poll, the overwhelming majority of people support instituting a photo ID requirement to access a ballot, including 78 percent of people polled by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in 2006 and 75 percent of people polled by the Minnesota State Legislature at the State Fair in 2001. Furthermore, support for photo ID at the polls is bipartisan: In the Pew poll, 71 percent of Democrats, 77 percent of Independents, and 86 percent of Republicans supported this measure.

With support like this, photo ID would be a good issue for any politician running for a state office to support this year.

Kent Kaiser, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of communication at Northwestern College in Roseville and a senior fellow at Center of the American Experiment. Kaiser previously served in the administrations of Secretaries of State Mary Kiffmeyer, a Republican, and Mark Ritchie, a Democrat. Center of the American Experiment’s full report, “No Longer a National Model: Fifteen Recommendations for Fixing Minnesota Election Law and Practice,” can be found at www.americanexperiment.org.