May 15, 2008
MISSOURI'S PROPOSED VOTING REQUIREMENT
COULD DISENFRANCHISE MORE THAN 200,000 U.S. CITIZENS
Rural, Low-Income, and African American Residents Among Most Affected
By Donna Cohen Ross and Allison Orris
Missouri’s legislature is
considering a constitutional amendment permitting the state to require residents
to provide documentary proof of their U.S. citizenship in order to vote. If
implemented, it risks disenfranchising large numbers of Missouri residents who
are U.S. citizens.
The amendment does not
specify the forms of documentation the state would accept as proof of
citizenship, but it appears likely that residents would have to produce a
certified birth certificate or passport. Proof of citizenship is generally
established in one of two ways, either through production of a birth certificate
or passport or through production of certain forms of government-issued photo
ID, but these IDs themselves generally cannot be obtained without a birth
certificate or passport.
Results from two national surveys show that a
large number of citizens lack birth certificates or passports including
disproportionately large numbers of people in potentially vulnerable
groups such as low-income, African American, and elderly residents. In
addition, a similar requirement recently imposed in Medicaid effectively pushed
tens of thousands of eligible people off the program and demonstrated that
obtaining the documents can prove difficult, time-consuming, and, in some cases,
essentially impossible.
Large Numbers of Missourians Lack the Required Documents
A January 2006
survey that Opinion Research Corporation conducted for the Center on Budget and
Policy Priorities found that nearly 11 million native-born American adults, or
5.7 percent of the native-born adult population, lack the documents the Missouri
proposal would require.
A survey the same firm conducted for the Brennan Center for Justice found
similar results.
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Assuming that this 5.7 percent
share is the same in Missouri as in the nation as a whole, we estimate that
238,000 Missourians lack these documents. Many would likely be unable to obtain
them on a timely basis and therefore would effectively be disenfranchised.
The survey also found that certain
demographic groups are much less likely than others to have the required
documents and thus would suffer disproportionate harm under the Missouri
requirement. These groups include people without a high school diploma
(9.2 percent of whom lack the documents), rural residents (9.1 percent of whom
lack them), African Americans (8.9 percent of whom lack them), households with
incomes below $25,000 (8.1 percent of whom lack them), and the elderly (7.4
percent of whom lack them).
One reason many
African Americans lack the documents is that a substantial number of African
Americans born in the South before World War II were born at home and thus never
received birth certificates, largely because of racial discrimination or poverty
that kept their mothers from delivering in hospitals. One study estimated that
a fifth of African-Americans born in 1939-40 lacked a birth certificate.
Assuming that the
above percentages are the same for Missouri as for the nation as a whole, the
estimated 238,000 Missourians who lack these documents would include:
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more than 90,000 rural residents;
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70,000 low-income residents;
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50,000 residents without a high
school diploma;
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50,000 elderly residents; and
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40,000 African
Americans.
Similar Requirement in Medicaid Has Harmed Tens of Thousands of
U.S. Citizens
Obtaining a birth
certificate or passport can take weeks or months and involve costs that can be
difficult for some low-income families to absorb: it can cost $5 to $23 to get
a birth certificate, depending on the state, while a passport costs $87 to $97
and now entails extended waits. Obtaining a birth certificate can be especially
time consuming for people not living in the state of their birth. This is a
significant problem for Missouri, since more than one-third (36 percent) of its
adult residents were born in another state.
Evidence that the
difficulty of obtaining these documents can cause otherwise-eligible people to
lose valuable benefits comes from Medicaid, which in 2006 began requiring most
U.S. citizen applicants and recipients to document their citizenship by
providing an original birth certificate, passport, or similar document. This is
what has happened:
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Tens of thousands of eligible
citizen children have been denied coverage. In numerous states, thousands
have been removed from, or denied entry into, Medicaid; many apparently became
(or remained) uninsured.
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Virtually no cases of fraud have
been found. The six states that have examined this issue in greatest detail
found that the new requirement, which had delayed or denied Medicaid coverage
for tens of thousands of people and had cost states $17 million to administer as
of July 2007, had identified a total of eight undocumented individuals
seeking to obtain Medicaid illegally.
(It is worth noting that some or all of these eight people might have been
caught under the previous procedures.)
In addition, in Oklahoma — which has yet to identify a single undocumented
immigrant on its Medicaid caseload — 13 percent of the 20,000 people who had
been dropped from Medicaid as of January 2008 under the new rule are Native
Americans (and thus are clearly not immigrants).
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Whites and African Americans
have been hit the hardest. The Medicaid requirement
was ostensibly aimed at undocumented immigrants, most of whom are Hispanic. Yet
the children who have lost coverage due to the requirement are
disproportionately non-Hispanic, according to the three states that have
reported these data.
This fact demonstrates that the requirement’s main impact has been on U.S.
citizens. (Hispanic citizens might be less affected than white or African
American citizens because they are often concerned that their citizenship status
may be questioned and thus are likely to make sure that they have readily
available vital documents to prove it.)
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Medicaid enrollment has dropped,
while administrative costs have risen. Thirty-seven states say the new
requirement has caused eligible citizen children to lose Medicaid coverage,
while 45 states say it has increased administrative costs, according to the
Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured.
The fact that tens
of thousands of American families were unable to meet this documentation
requirement, even on such a high-stakes matter as obtaining health coverage for
their children, speaks volumes about the likely impact on Missouri if it were to
adopt a similar rule for prospective voters. Missouri’s proposed voting
requirement would undermine the legitimacy of elections in the state by making
it difficult or impossible for many of the state’s citizen residents to exercise
their right to vote.
End Notes:
For the precise
wording of the survey questions, see Leighton Ku, Donna Cohen Ross, and Matt
Broaddus, “Survey Indicates the Deficit Reduction Act Jeopardizes Medicaid
Coverage for 3 to 5 Million U.S. Citizens,” Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities, revised February 17, 2006,
https://www.cbpp.org/1-26-06health.pdf.
See “Citizens
Without Proof,” November 2006,
http://www.brennancenter.org/page/-/d/download_file_39242.pdf.
Data from Census
Bureau’s 2006 American Community Survey.
“Medicaid Citizenship Documentation Requirements Deny Coverage to Citizens
And Cost Taxpayers Millions,” Majority Staff, Committee on Oversight and
Government Reform, July 24, 2007.
Formerly, most
states required documentation from citizen applicants if there were reason
to question an applicant’s truthfulness. States also checked with the
Social Security Administration to ensure that applicants have valid SSNs,
and continue to do so.
Barbara Basler,
“Are You a Citizen? Prove It,” AARP Bulletin, March 2008.
This would not
be occurring if the requirement were affecting undocumented immigrants,
since an estimated 78 percent of undocumented immigrants are from Mexico,
Central America, or South America, according to the respected Pew Hispanic
Center.See Jeff Passel, “The Size and Characteristics of the
Unauthorized Migrant Population in the United States,” Pew Hispanic Center,
March 2006.
Vernon Smith
et al., “As Tough Times Wane, States Act to Improve Medicaid Coverage
and Quality,” Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, October 2007. |