Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Does your lack of ID make me a racist?

There is a movement in the states to require ID before you vote.  Texas recently became the 12th state to require some form of identification before you can vote.

This has sparked outrage and indignation from the usual suspects.  They claim such things as:
  • Requiring ID is racist
  • ID's are hard to get
  • This won't help stop voter fraud
All of these objections are patent nonsense.  Worse, they are politically motivated FUD that is designed to scare people away from supporting commonsense ideas.


Voter ID is racist:  There are a number of prominent politicians and others that have taken this approach.  "Jim Crow, move over -- the Wisconsin Republicans have taken your place," charged Wisconsin Democratic State Sen. Bob Jauch, referring to his state's new voter ID law.

The objection is that fewer minorities (read: Black people) possess a government ID than the general population (read: white people).   Therefore, voter ID will have a disproportionate effect on minorities (read: democrat voters), and is therefore illegal.

Paradoxically, these are the same people that pass laws requiring you to show ID to buy cigarettes, alcohol, or otherwise function as an adult in society.

The reasoning is that voting is a an important Right, and therefore cannot be infringed by requiring you to have an ID.  (Wouldn't it be nice if the Democrats felt the same way about the Second Amendment!)

It seems logical, however, to conclude that voting is so important that we should take pains to ensure that only eligible voters are able to cast ballots.

It does not seem like obtaining a government issued ID is an unreasonable burden to place on the would-be voter.  And as we do for other cases where voter registration is in question, the ID-less voter can cast a provisional ballot.  This ballot can be accepted or rejected later once the voter establishes their identity.

The benefits would be huge.

It would make voter fraud much more difficult to execute.  Instead of busing homeless people from precinct to precinct, the fraudsters would be required to get matching fake ID's for each fake voter. 

I think we should actually take this a step further.  The government ID pictures should be attached to the actual voter registration rolls.

When I go to the health club, my ID card gets scanned and my picture pops up. Let's do the same for voting.

Here in Illinois, the state has my picture and it is linked to all of my other records.  How do I know?  Because my FOID card has the same picture as my driver's license.   If those two systems can share a picture, then the voter registration people can be linked in there as well.

I think that voter ID is critical to maintaining the integrity of the vote totals.  It will massively cut down on voter fraud, and the side that benefits the most from voter fraud knows this.

So naturally, they call it racist.

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