lol

What about the Amish, who don’t allow their pictures to be taken (but do vote)?

What about Muslim women who don’t show their faces on ID cards?

Look how easy it is to get a fake ID in this country. And if, as the example of Philadelphia reveals every four years, the principal corruption is in those who oversee the polling places, not in the individual voters, this won’t do anything to change that.

It will just be another layer of bureaucracy to the country. Change my tentative “yes” to an “undecided.”

Waive the fee, if there is one in the first place, for anyone below the poverty line. A non-driver ID card in Pennsylvania only costs $10 anyhow.

My caveat is that I have minimal confidence in any level of government to do this with sufficient efficiency to be a measurable improvement over the current situation. That’s nothing to do with classical conservatism and everything to do with personal experience.

People sometimes spend hours waiting in line to vote.  Spending some time ONCE to get an ID… which is also necessary to buy liquor, cash a check or board an airliner… and whose fee is waived for those of lesser means seems like a trivial burden compared to making it harder to commit voter fraud.

Is the problem with legally disqualified people trying to make one vote, or other vote fraud where people vote multiple times under different names? I haven’t seen information on how pervasive either of these problems are, but I agree that such problems should be addressed.

The discrimination argument makes sense to me. The ID requirement would have a greater effect among poor and elderly people who may not be able to afford to buy a state ID or afford to take time off to go navigate the motor vehicle department. (Yes, I got the talking points today.)

Will there be funds to provide IDs to people in this situation? Can the process be streamlined enough to allow for same-day voter registration? (For the states that currently allow it that is.)

Glitches in electronic voting in the Columbus area should move all legislatures to demand paper receipts for voting machines. Without such a paper trail, no true recount can ever be done. Note that no Diebold electronic voting machines were employed in Ohio.

A Note On The Presidential Election in Ohio

Reform is important. The argument for reform is weakened when we don’t have our facts straight. Thank you.

Getting an ID, dealing with that bureaucracy, is a royal pain in the ass for everyone. Especially with all the post-9/11 red tape. I can understand why people want to avoid it. And of course it will be imperfect; underaged kids still manage to drink, too. Though if a lot of us cared as much about thinking and voting as we did about getting a buzz we’d be better off.

Tough. A government that makes no effort to hold legitimate elections is not a democracy. If the price of that is somebody wasting an afternoon in the DMV, that’s the price of it.

Allowing a legally disqualified voter to vote in an election has the same impact as denying a legal voter the right to do so. The different flow of the national concern about those two issues is telling. In each case, you deny a legitimate expression of political power — in the one case directly by denying the right to vote, in the other indirectly, by erasing the expression of one who voted other than the illegal voter via a false counter-vote.