A proposal to tighten voter ID laws emanated from the Liberal party room last week.
It resembles many initiatives of the Morrison government, and most of the ideas which have emerged from Australian conservatism more broadly in the past decade or more, in that it is opportunistic, unoriginal, and so unnecessary as to be baffling.
It does not appear to be a response to anything that is actually happening in Australia.
There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Australia, where compulsory voting and universal electoral enrolment make voter fraud at scale almost inconceivable.
Australian elections are uncommonly well run by a central, statutory authority. There have never been any serious doubts raised about their administrative fairness and validity – no one in the party room that issued the legislative plan has ever suggested that previous elections are rigged.
Indeed, the only questions about the fairness of Australian elections are those that this proposal necessarily implies.
It should not be understood as a solution to any real problem, but rather a clumsy uptake of culture war themes now current in the United States, whose conservative movement the Australian right is constantly mining for the ideas it cannot generate from itself.
That’s not to say there is any real evidence of systematic voter fraud in US elections either.
Every major reputable analysis done has shown that voter fraud is relatively rare, isolated and unorganised.
The few recent prosecutions for voter fraud have included instances which are effectively accidents, or have even been fuelled by politically and racially motivated desire for revenge, rather than deliberate attempts to falsely claim partisan advantage.
The right in the US, however, has long worked on promoting the idea that voter fraud is rampant.
For decades, Republicans have agitated to introduce voter ID laws to respond to the non-existent problem.
They do this simply because anything that makes it more difficult to vote disproportionately depresses the electoral performance of Democrats.
The constituencies who vote for Democrats in the greatest numbers – young people, people of colour, and other groups – are less likely to have the forms of identification that voter ID laws would require.
Also, ID checks slow the whole process of voting down. Working people, who already make great efforts to vote on a weekday, are less likely to be able to afford the additional time away from work.
Narratives of voter fraud have, of course, been turbocharged by Donald Trump’s false claims about the result of the 2020 election.
Even before the results were announced, Trump was questioning their validity. His acolytes then made the false notion of a stolen election the basis of a street protest movement.
Infamously, the 6 January storming of the US Capitol building began as a rally which sought to pressure then vice president Mike Pence into not validating the election.
Since election day, audits pushed by Trump loyalists have turned up no verifiable election misconduct, but they have nevertheless inspired state-level Republicans to impose restrictions which will make it more difficult for Democrats to win in their states in the future.
This has meant that along with the bogeyman of critical race theory, conservatives in the US have been talking a lot about new rules which would bring about the voter suppression they see as necessary to their future success.
In Australia, voter ID laws would likely be most burdensome to traditional Labor and Greens constituencies such as young people, First Nations people and recent migrants.
In previous years, the Coalition has attempted to mess around with enrolment deadlines for similar purposes.
But while requiring IDs may materially help them in some close electoral contests, this is better read as a symptom of the Australian right’s stunning lack of imagination.
It seems like they are doing something, but really this is a move to disguise the fact that the government’s great imperative is to do nothing on any issue of importance, from climate change to reconciliation or inequality.
Morrison and the government he leads behave and think like a dour middle order batsman. Their job is simply to occupy the crease for as long as possible.
Voter ID laws might help them do that. If not, such proposals at least help pass the time.
