In the midst of a noisy campaign, it’s edifying to sweep away the noise and focus on the facts. That can be extremely difficult to do with campaigns that revolve around candidates.

It would be nice if we could trust the mainstream media to do an unbiased evaluation of candidates’ positions and proposals, but that’s increasingly rare these days. Members of the media, on both sides, are often focused on propping up their preferred candidate rather than dissecting the facts of their positions.

Referendum campaigns, on the other hand, can be much more simple to analyze. Sure, there’s a deluge of ads flooding the state, particularly from liberal groups opposing the voter ID question and supporting the red flag proposal, but there’s an easy way to cut through that noise: read the legislation.

You see, unlike in a candidate campaign, the text of the legislation we’re voting on in a referendum campaign is unchanged until Election Day. In an ideal world, every voter would read the text of the legislation itself, but if you don’t have the time for that, the Secretary of State’s office has a handy summary for voters. 

The summary of the voter ID proposal is pretty straightforward: it requires voters to present their ID for in-person and absentee voters. That’s the bulk of the proposal, but other provisions include requiring the Secretary of State to provide free IDs, allowing voters to submit provisional ballots without IDs, eliminating the ability to apply for absentee ballots over the phone and halting the practice of sending absentee ballots automatically every cycle.

It also limits municipalities to one location for a drop box and allows for a religious exemption to the photo requirement. That’s it. That’s the entire proposal, as summarized in the Secretary of State’s voter guide.

There are a few important points in this summary. One is that people won’t be turned away from the polls if they don’t have a valid photo ID. Instead, they can complete a provisional ballot. Then, if they return to the registrar of voters within four days after an election and present their ID, that ballot will be counted.

So, you don’t have to worry that, somehow, you’ll end up standing in line for hours and be turned away because you forgot your ID; that’s not a concern. 

Most of the provisions of the bill are directly related to the mechanics of voter ID itself and make perfect sense in that context. If Maine is going to require voter IDs for absentee ballots, then we obviously can’t allow for applying absentee ballots over the phone or simply mailing absentee ballots to the same address every cycle.

If we kept doing that, then the law wouldn’t apply to all voters equally; it would apply more harshly to new absentee voter and to voters voting in person. That likely wouldn’t pass constitutional muster, which is also why an exemption for religious beliefs was included.

It must also be noted that the bill requires the Secretary of State’s office to provide free identification cards for voting purposes. This is another standard feature of voter ID laws all over the country, as it ensures that everyone has the opportunity to acquire the required photographic ID and vote.

So, in addition to nobody being kept away from the polls because they forgot their ID, nobody will have to pay for an ID just to vote — they’ll be able to get one for free. There will be a cost to that, of course, but it’s a necessary provision of the program.

The one unnecessary provision is the limiting of ballot drop boxes, but it’s not a terribly onerous one. Those ballot drop boxes are a fairly recent phenomenon, after all, and they could have attempted to eliminate them completely in this referendum — just as they could have scaled back absentee voting far more.

All in all, this proposal is a responsible, reasonable way to implement voter ID, not some backhanded attempt to restrict voting in other ways, as its opponents allege.

The truth of the matter is that opponents of this referendum aren’t worried about any particular aspects of the proposal, but about voter ID as a concept. That’s fine, but then they ought to go out and make that argument.

Rather than trying to scare people about this particular piece of legislation, they should make it clear to people that they simply oppose voter ID in any way, shape, or form — and explain why. 

That would, at least, be honest.