Yesterday, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie unveiled a magic bullet for the voter ID issue. Ritchie presented a technology that would be cheaper than voter ID, less susceptible to fraud, and could be used without disenfranchising voters. Now we’ll see if voter ID proponents are really concerned with ensuring election integrity, as they claim, or if their primary goal is to take away your right to vote. If it’s truly the latter, they should get on board with Ritchie’s proposal.

During a Senate hearing on Friday, Ritchie described the electronic poll books made by Datacard, a Minnesota company. Like photo ID, the system puts a photo of the potential voter in front of the election judge who can decide whether the person is who they say. But instead of the voter providing the ID, which could be forged, the photo is securely pulled up from Minnesota’s drivers license photo database. The poll book could be on paper or on a computer.

If a person isn’t in the photo database, the person could register and have a photo taken on the spot. Because voting twice in an election is a felony, it’s very unlikely someone would risk being photographed committing the crime.

Ritchie estimates such a system could be implemented in Minnesota for about $10 million. That’s about $30 million less than the estimated cost of a voter photo ID system advocated by Republicans last legislative session. [The Uptake, via MN Progressive Project]

This is really huge, and should be a win for everyone. It provides a surefire method of verifying voters’ identities, while removing the barrier to voting that requiring ID would impose. Even better, it’s cheaper to implement this technology than to subsidize the cost of getting an ID. There’s absolutely no reason for Republicans to oppose electronic poll books.

I guess that’s not true. There’s one reason I can think of: Ritchie’s proposal wouldn’t take away some Minnesotans’ voting rights. If Republicans reject electronic poll books, that would be the strongest evidence yet that what they’re really after is to stop Minnesotans from voting.