What conceivable reason could a person give for opposing a requirement for a valid ID before voting? Could it be that ID’s “suppress” and “disenfranchise” voters? Surely, some people have good reason for not having a valid ID at the time of voting. Can the circumstance be handled without obstructing ID laws? Certainly. Provisional ballots can be issued till identification is verified. It’s already being done.
Is getting an ID so onerous that it places an undue burden on the disadvantaged? Well, if it is, banks and stores are imposing a “disparate impact” on the needy. Where was Obama’s DOJ in enforcing “equal access” to check-cashing and retail services?
Obama’s DOJ is nowhere to be seen around check-cashing counters and cash registers. Getting an ID is easy. It takes some time and a little effort. Instead, the Obama’s DOJ warriors targeted efforts at purging voter rolls of invalid registrants, while denying access to the fed’s database. They didn’t hesitate hauling state officials before the federal bar for having the same condition to vote as for boarding a plane, entering a federal courthouse, and to buy booze.
Much of the media is complicit in the charade. Instead of a balanced treatment of the issue, we get a drawn out game of gotcha. Trump tweets something and many in the media rush to the “fact-checking” websites to contradict him.
They get hung up on the factoid. Proving Trump wrong is more important than the core issue. The real issue isn’t the accurate number of illegal votes, whether its 3 million, 5 million, or 346. The real contest is between maximizing voter turnout at all costs and ensuring the integrity of the vote. The two positions are at odds.
The zeal to contradict Trump is an adjunct of the zeal to show vote fraud is rare. Since it is said to be rare, measures meant to prevent it are assumed to be grounded in racial animus, xenophobia, white privilege, and the rest of the “Occupy” check list. Thus, full speed ahead to making it easier to vote than to buy toilet paper.
Did it ever occur to anyone that the alleged rarity of a crime is, quite frankly, irrelevant to the need to prevent it? For example, take murder. Murder is certainly rare in comparison to all crimes. It’s statistically infinitesimal. Following the logic of the no-ID crowd, efforts to define the act and to forestall its occurrence must be a waste of time.
Is it a wild analogy? Think again. Infinitesimal percentages are concocted by comparing a small number of occurrences with a much larger pool of instances. Applying the math to the case of voter fraud, the number of discovered occurrences is infinitesimal to the large pool of 125 million votes.
The reasoning for laws about voter fraud is the same as for laws about murder. The laws aren’t dependent on the frequency of their occurrence. The laws exist because the acts occur, unless the no-ID claque is asserting vote fraud is at absolute “0” (absolute zero is 0 Kelvin or -459F). Now that’s absolutism … and silly.
It’s safe to say that vote fraud is significantly above absolute “0”. The need to buttress the already shaky proposition of the no-vote-fraud/no-ID-laws clamor leads to the flailing about for other sources of support. Mentioning Colin Powell or court decisions is a common and worn out tactic. Neither one has much validity.
Both are examples of the fallacious exercise of argumentum ad verecundiam (argument from authority). People throw out names or opinions as if these are dispositive. They aren’t. Without more substance, their use will fill up space in a column but add nothing to the argument.
The practice of citing court opinions is particularly weak. Court opinions on issues like voter ID laws range all over the issue landscape. One reason for the variance is the tactic of court-shopping by activists. People seek judges and courts with a history of a particular bias. Yep, bias exists in the judiciary. Just because a judge has spoken, don’t assume God has. Search long enough and you’ll find another jurist to contradict somebody.
Facetious arguments such as these only cloud an already hazy situation. The multiplicity of geographical actors in the system is astounding. Voting occurs in millions of homes through mail-in ballots, in over 110,000 polling places (a guesstimate) across the country, all managed by the 50 separate states. The interactions of this crazy quilt would overwhelm the skills of the X-Men. It’s a fertile environment for gaffes, waste, and abuse.
Some coordination among some of the states to help clean up their voter lists has occurred with the Electronic Registration Information Center of 21 states and the 30 states belonging to the Interstate Crosscheck Program sponsored by the Kansas Secretary of State. The country’s most populous state, California, doesn’t appear to belong to either club.
In the headlong rush to rock the vote, California has left a few zombies on the voter rolls. Dead people vote. One reporter for the CBS affiliate in Los Angeles found 265 dead voters, with 215 in LA County alone. 146 were Democrats. On person who went cold in 2003 nonetheless voted in ’04, ’05, ’06, ’08, and ’10. Another commuter from the grave entered it in 2004 but later roamed out to vote in ’08, ’10, ’12, ’14. 32 of the walking dead voted in 8 elections apiece.
In fact, California was the last state to come into compliance with the Help America Vote Act of 2002. It took 14 years and the final weeks before the 2016 general election for the state to make itself legal, after it rushed into online registration up to 15 days before the election, and the wave of 600,000 new registrants in the weeks before the June primary.
They don’t even record IP addresses so one enterprising soul with a laptop hanging out at Disneyland’s Star Tour could register the crowd in the waiting line. Pardon me but I’m skeptical about something called “verification”.
Compounding the difficulties is the campaign to expand the electorate into the margins of the politically casual and ignorant.
It means making voting as easy as turning on the tv set. It means voting at home and by mail. Of course, the mail-in vote puts the kibosh to the secret ballot. Plural ballots sent to the same address presents the delightful opportunity of one person filling out everyone’s ballot. Who knows what takes place at the kitchen table.
For some states like California, going to the DMV to register your car, or obtain or renew a driver’s license, will nearly lock you into the voter list. If a person misses the citizen/non-citizen section on the form, the state will seek you out for an answer. If you refuse one, they’ll register you anyway.
If you explicitly checked “no”, the state will hunt you down with a letter to verify the “no” answer. Apparently, what part of “no” don’t they understand?
What about that driver’s license, the ticket to all things requiring ID, as in registering to vote? States like California issue them to illegal non-citizens. Illegals get one nearly indistinguishable from a 4th generation native.
Except for a notation in the upper right hand corner and on the back, the thing is exactly like my sons. How this avoids a violation of the Real ID Act, Title II, Section 202 – “uses a unique design or color indicator to alert Federal agency and other law enforcement personnel ” – is beyond my understanding. I can only hope the small print catches the attention of the eagle eyes of the counter clerk. Good luck.
But then again, you don’t need it to vote in a state life California. In that zoo, it’s illegal to even ask for the thing at the polling place. No better word describes elections in many places in America than “slipshod”. How did it get this bad?
Well, if your goal is to maximize turnout, you cut corners on vote integrity. You’re willing to accept some cancellation of legal votes by illegal ones in the rush to get a ballot into everyone’s hands. Disparagement of the desire to protect legal ones from cancellation is part of the propaganda onslaught that we’re experiencing today.
The absurdity of criminalizing a request for an ID, obstructing access to federal lists that might expose illegals on the voter rolls, pushing for avenues of voting that make a hash out of the secret ballot, and the embrace of the fetish of corralling the inattentive and uninterested into the electorate makes a mockery of our republic.
It raises an interesting question: Why vote? Devoting the time and effort to keep up on things will prove to be no asset once your ballot joins those others.
RogerG