Politics & Government

Hayden Questions Haste of Voter Photo ID Bill

Minneapolis state Rep. Jeff Hayden said there might be better ways to deal with issues of voter fraud, which in each case last year came from felons who mistakenly voted before they were eligible, not people impersonating voters.

As the Republican-dominated legislature pushes for a law that would require photo identification to vote, Rep. Jeff Hayden(DFL-Minneapolis) questioned whether the requirement was the best approach to deal with voter fraud.

Hayden points out that the few people wrongly voting were former felons who didn't know if they were yet eligible, which wouldn't be addressed by a photo ID requirement.

Last year there were 38 cases of voter fraud, all of which involved former felons, none of whom were impersonating anyone.

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Hayden references a bill last year that would have informed former felons when they were again eligible to vote, which he suggested would have corrected the voter fraud, as opposed to this "full-frontal every single person needs to have an identification [approach]."

"There are a lot of different issues that maybe we haven't thought about in the haste to get this bill to us," Hayden said. We need to "get a sense of what the history has been in this issue."

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