In Kentucky, a photo ID is required to vote. But in cases when a voter does not have a photo ID, he or she is allowed to sign an affidavit and produce a secondary form of identification. Currently, two of those secondary ID options include Social Security and food assistance cards, which do not have photos.
Senate Bill 154 would take those two options away.
Bill sponsor Sen. Lindsay Tichenor argued the goal is to strengthen the state's voter ID rules. She pointed to other states that have taken a similar path.
"We do have 13 states that require photo ID in order to cast the ballot. So this would get us in line with some other states and really in line with a stronger system to have identification for our voters," she said Wednesday.
Yet when pressed on whether there were any known instances of fraud using Social Security or food assistance cards in the last election, Tichenor acknowledged there are no active cases — instead, citing trafficking of EBT and SNAP cards and what she described as "rampant" Social Security identity fraud across the country.
"It concerns me that every year we're seeing laws passed through this body that make it more difficult to vote despite not having any evidence that there's a problem that we're trying to solve," Sen. Cassie Chambers Armstrong countered. "And so the fact that a thousand people voted validly using this last election cycle and yet we're taking that away, I don't understand why we're doing that."
The bill cleared a Kentucky Senate committee Wednesday and now moves to the full chamber.