Professor Chin Interviewed by Bloomberg Radio on Voter Identification Requirement Laws

Professor Gabriel "Jack" Chin was interviewed on Bloomberg Radio's "Morning Bloomberg Law Brief" on March 24 regarding a federal judge's order that will enable Arizona and Kansas to require proof of citizenship from registering voters.

Judge Eric F. Melgren of United States District Court in Wichita ruled on March 19 that the federal Election Assistance Commission had no legal authority to deny requests from Kansas and Arizona to add state-specific instructions requiring proof of citizenship to the national voter registration form. Professor Chin explained the background of the case and commented that the proof of citizenship requirement was unnecessary.

"First of all, there's really no evidence that there's a problem of people voting in the name of some other person or ineligible persons voting, so this is a solution that as far as we can tell, doesn't have a problem associated with it," said Chin. "The other thing is that the solution doesn't really work. These voter ID laws require voters to show identification to untrained election officials, so they're never going to be able to detect high quality fake IDs. So if there were this group of sophisticated voter fraudsters out there, this system would never work."

Gabriel "Jack" Chin, who joined the King Hall faculty in 2011, is a prolific and much-cited criminal and immigration law scholar whose work has addressed many of the most pressing social issues of our time.

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