When Missouri’s GOP argued for aggressive changes to voter ID requirements at the ballot box, they countered critics by saying the state would market those changes, making sure that legitimate voters wouldn’t be harmed.
Now, only a few months into the Greiten’s administration, many of those promises are falling apart.
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Gov. Eric Greitens offered $300,000 for implementation in his budget plan released last week: $100,000 each for advertising the changes, paying for free IDs and covering the cost of getting personal records for those IDs.
But Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, who is tasked with letting voters know about the law, estimated Tuesday it would take between $1.1 million and $1.5 million to do so before August elections.
That's a far cry from the roughly $5.2 million former secretary Jason Kander, a Democrat, requested over two years. Ashcroft said he could trim millions from Kander's proposal by cutting TV ads and mailers about the changes to every registered voter in the state, instead relying on partnerships with community organizations and face-to-face interactions with potential voters.
The betrayal would come as no surprise to Missouri Democratic Senator Scott Sifton, who in the 2016 session offered this warning to his fellow members: “There will be people harmed by this, statewide.” Sen. Sifton raised several issues, including the information provided to voters.
Now, the state of Missouri will be implementing a voter ID system and informing voters only through community organizations — without naming them.
Because many communities in Missouri are fairly small, this method would be done through a patchwork of multiple groups, and many communities would have no information at all; leaving a lot of Missourians in the dark as to the requirements of voter ID rules.
Others have questioned the fiscal reasoning to do this at all:
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Kathleen Farrell, co-president of the League of Women Voters of St. Louis, said she couldn't understand spending on voter ID when the state faces difficult choices elsewhere to close a $500 million budget hole.
"This is a totally unnecessary thing in a state that’s strapped," she said. "When we’re cutting poor people off Medicaid, not funding our schools and our roads crumbling, why are we spending money on this?"