Before Virginia legislators listen to Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam’s call to eliminate voter-ID requirements in the commonwealth’s elections, they should listen to former U.S. Rep. Artur Davis, D-Ala.

Northam announced Monday he would introduce a bill to eliminate polling-place photo-ID requirements for voting, along with drastically simplifying absentee voting and putting new strictures on campaign contributions. Most of his proposals are ill-advised, but the no-ID one is particularly misguided.

Rarely does anybody make a case so clearly, and visually arrestingly, as the one Davis made in favor of voter-ID requirements at a conference in 2012. Davis, a moderate who has switched parties several times, was speaking at a conference with True the Vote, a ballot-integrity organization.

As I described it then, his speech was a tour de force:



"Holding up a photo-ID, he ridiculed those who say it is too great a burden to require one – especially those who have said such a requirement is a violation of civil rights and human dignity."



"'This is not a billy club,' he said, recalling violent civil rights battles of the past. 'This is not a fire hose…. This is not Jim Crow…. My parents and my grandparents can tell you what a colored-only water fountain tasted like. They could tell you what a colored-only bathroom smelled like.' It certainly, he said, was nothing like his ID card: 'this tiny little thing that doesn’t wound, that has no sharp edges.' And: 'To call photo ID a degradation of human rights is not only something that is so fundamentally wrong, but is something my parents would not even recognize…. That [claim that ID requirements violate human rights] is the old tactic of telling us the very opposite of what is true.'"





The October before, Davis had written a column for the Montgomery Advertiser acknowledging that vote fraud is very real. “If you doubt it exists, I don't,” he wrote. “I've heard the peddlers of these ballots brag about it, I've been asked to provide the funds for it, and I am confident it has changed at least a few close local election results.”

Plenty of others have shown, again and again, that vote fraud is real. It quite arguably was responsible for Al Franken winning a Senate seat in Minnesota, which in turn provided the single last vote needed to pass Obamacare. Sometimes, the attempts to commit fraud, or the official incompetence against it, is risible — such as the time in Illinois when an absentee ballot was mailed (quite literally) to a dead goldfish named Princess Nudelman.

If Virginia legislators follow Northam’s lead, they will be harming the integrity of Virginia’s elections. Real, honest voters should not stand for it.