First, the form: As far as I can tell, the form says that you have to prove your citizenship when you register to vote, not when you ask for an absentee ballot. If you’re registered already, you don’t need to provide that. If it says otherwise, please point it out – I’m not saying it doesn’t, I just couldn’t find it.
You miss my point regarding voter ID laws. I’m not saying that absentee ballots swing one way or the other (there may be reasons they do, see below, but it’s not important to my point). However, in-person voter ID laws can accomplish two things:
- Prevent in-person voter fraud
- Make it difficult for people without current ID to vote
Let’s stipulate, for a moment, that in-person ID requirements make it harder for the poor to vote. If that’s the case, these rules make it harder for the poor to vote, and the poor vote tends to go for Democrats. So, in-person ID requirements may disproportionately disenfranchise Democratic voters.
However, it may also prevent voter fraud. However, it’s difficult to perpetrate any effective in-person fraud without getting many people in on the scheme. It’s easier to perpetrate widespread absentee voter fraud with fewer people because a single mail-room person, for example, could have access to many absentee ballots.
If the only purpose of these rules is to prevent voter fraud, a juicier target (or, at least, an equivalent target) would be absentee voting, not in-person voting. If, however, the main purpose is to disenfranchise Democratic-leaning voting, then going after only in-person voting makes sense.
Since it’s easier to vote absentee than in-person, I can only conclude that the primary purpose is to disenfranchise legitimate voters, not to prevent voter fraud. That’s the case, whether absentee voters skew one way, the other, or are evenly split.
In practice, though, I could certainly imagine that absentee voters (wealthy voters with more than one residence, older voters who have difficulty going to the polls, military voters who are stationed at bases around the world) may skew Republican. However, that’s not necessary in order say voting laws that make it difficult to vote in person are blatantly partisan, if they don’t also make it more difficult to vote absentee.
The Oregon case is irrelevant – if all voting is absentee, it clearly is non-partisan and won’t affect how the state skews, right?