Voter Id
The US Supreme Court has taken up the case of Indiana's voter ID requirement. Indiana requires a photo ID in order to vote. A driver's license, state-issued ID, or passport meet their requirements. Anything issued by the state or federal government with a picture on it is apparently acceptable. doesn't sound too controversial does it? Well it is.
I like to listen to the Diane Riehm (sp) Show on NPR. She's a good interviewer and generally comes prepared, the antithesis of listening to Larry King on anysubject other than baseball. You can reliably the count on hearing a pretty good repetition of the left's point of view, and most of the time the right's. btw, this is where I recently learned that there are no long-term psychological effects on women who receive abortion surgery! Hey, the woman was a Doctor who performs abortions; she must be right, right? In any event, Diane had Jeffrey Toobin, the CNN gadfly, constitutional law professor, and prolific author on. The right was defended by parties unremembered by me.
Professor Toobin claimed that the voter ID was a needless burden on the voter and that we should concentrate on getting more voter participation instead. He claimed that the signatures most election officials compare for ID validation was sufficient. They even had a gal who said that signatures were a quite effective way of establishing authenticity, the implication being that the present system is fine. She didn't quite get to the point of saying that signatures were as good or better than photos.
Mr.Toobin then went on to claim that there really isn't a problem with voter fraud in the US. He went so far as to say that he couldn't see what was in it for the individual voter! This is about the point at which I lost it. I know that he knows better. The program barely got into the concept of "walking around" money before it ended. Walking around money is what is paid to individuals to ride on a bus with five or six like minded individuals and ride from precinct to precinct and voting. They present themselves as voters whom are either dead, moved out of state, or otherwise not able to vote-yet remain on the voter rolls. Both sides agreed that most of the country's precincts have woefully out-dated voter rolls. I can believe this because my wife finally got her's straigtened out after about five years. she regularly received two voter ID cards; one with her married name and no middle initial and one with her full name, both at the same address.
Mr. Toobin is apparently willfully unfamiliar with the history of voting in Cook County, Illinois among other locations with a history of political "machines". It's hard to believe that he is unfamiliar with the activities of ACORN and their resultant legal troubles. Yet he is willing to seriously advance the notion that no one benefits from attempting voter fraud. Let's do some math. I can spend $100,000 on my canidacy. Do I want to spend it on ad time during the football game, where most viewers regard it as a nuisance compared to the dalmation jumping off the Bud wagon into the Miller truck,or do I want to spend it on actual "voters"? At $20 a "voter" I can get 5000 voters for the same $100,000. That ain't chopped liver. My "voter" pool doesn't even have to be comprised of US citizens or even residents of the precinct they're voting in; they just got to get the signature mostly close. And when the polls are jammed, and the precinct workers know that the only news story likely to come out of their precinct is to be one that criticizes them for not allowing everyone to vote, how closely are they really going to look at the signature card? The guy is here, he says he's John Doe, we've got a John Doe on the registry, he must be legit; here's your ballot.
Now I tend to like Mr. Toobin as he seems an agreeable chap and he does a pretty good job of letting you know where his prejudices lie without losing all objectivity. And, as I recall, he was a big fan of the "motor-voter" legislation that required your DMV to offer to register you to vote while getting your driver's license, a driver's license most notable for it's picture of the bearer. So what gives? Well, the Indiana law is being challenged by the ACLU and the usual suspects. And their sole bone of contention is that the law puts an unfair burden on your disabled granny and other's like her. An issue I am not fully conversant on, the veritable explosion of absentee voting with it's attendant potential for fraud, does bear investigating further in this regard also. It seems to be only common sense to ask what type of voter is unable to produce a photo ID card. Would it be too cynical to also ask what type of person has the wherewithal to spend the day voting, repeatedly? And while we're being cynical, does anyone have any doubt as to which party this practise will tend to help the most?
In related news, Secretary Chertoff says that the states do not have to implement the new federally required ID cards, but that you will not be allowed to board a plane after early May of this year without one or a passport. As a practical matter, the average citizen doesn't care nearly as much about voting as he does about being able to board a Miami-bound plane at O'Hare airport in February. You're not going to find too many snowbirds unable to go to the lengths necessary to get an ID card that get's them out of the cold midwest in February.
The irony to all of this is that the average citizen manages to somehow come up with a proper ID at the video rental store and it's a practical impossibility to keep your sixteen year old from acquiring one via driver's ed. Teenagers afflicted with everything up to and including leprosy will crawl to the DMV if necessary to pick up their photo ID, and their driving privelages.
Certain bitter and cynical readers may couple this issue with the current status of US immigration policy. Actually, that last sentence was only a skillfully worded canard. There is no US immigration policy. There is only the existing US immigration practise; a practise that allows illegal aliens to enter the country at will, become employed, get driver's licenses, and vote-repeatedly. What's wrong with this picture?
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“Scientists are people who build the Brooklyn Bridge and then buy it.”
Wm. F. Buckley, Jr.
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