hs,

You pose the question as to how we ensure that no one is disenfranchised by voter identification laws. The actions taken to date already have far exceeded what could be reasonably expected. Free identification cards are already available to combat the dubious claim that there are a large number of civic minded individuals who are anxious to exercise their constitutional right to vote but that have no current identification and just do note have $15 dollars to spare to obtain an id card. Provisional ballets can be cast by those lacking current identification. Voter registration has been made available at the DMV and other places for those who would just be to trouble to make a short trip in order to exercise their most basic constitutional rights.

I have a far more reasonable question for you. How do you propose to ensure that fraudulent votes are not recorded? The current position of the Democratic Party seems to be that everyone should be entitled to vote without showing any proof that they are a citizen entitled to vote. The position seems to be we should just take everyone at the word when they say they are a citizen entitles to vote. Can anyone claim with a straight face that this is not an invitation to commit fraud?

The rights of everyone are impacted when those not eligible to vote still cast ballets. In a democracy, rights come with responsibilities. The responsibility to show you are who you say you are in order to vote seems to be a pretty minor inconvenience compared to the damage done to our system by fraud and the appearance of fraud.

I believe that I have the solution to this problem. Let all of the people with no photo ID vote, put all of their unopened ballots in a pile, put half of the ballots in the Democrat column and put the other half in the Republican column. This way everyone will get to vote and all of the votes will be counted. This seems a fair way to do it.

Tim Jones- Please provide proof to substantiate (look it up) the stuff you are shoveling.

If the Dems can’t win without fraudulent voters, the Reps can’t win without shutting out large blocks of votes by underhanded means.

Cut it out. I have no problem with a decently designed and administered ID system. What I have a problem with is the screaming on both sides that makes voting rights and citizenship into a partisan pissing contest.

The question is: how do we insure that every citizen who is entitled to do so (a) has the opportunity to vote and (b) has their vote properly counted? My ultimate solution: 1: keep the polls open for 24 hours on election day, nationwide. (It could even be done with all polls opening at exactly the same time in all time zones. Midnight to midnight in New York, 9 pm to 9 pm in California). Also, no vote counting, no projections, no exit polling until the polls are closed. 2. Have absolute citizenship ID by hand print or retinal scan.

For the proper counting question, I’d suggest a nationwide standard for ballot design, system design, and some form of verifiable paper trail. If the monetary system can do it, I’d think the balloting system could do it too.

I’ll just say this once again for this list, as the watchers may not have seen it on the other list. Voter ID is just another republican trick to suppress the vote of people that would likely be voting Democratic. For the sake of argument I would accept voter ID if phased in over a long enough period of time to answer the hardships of those that may not have a birth certificate, because they weren’t born in a hospital, or are too old as long as the government or the republican party pays for any costs involved, but also conditional that they make vote fraud, and election theft by hacking, mass purging of vote rolls, misallocating voting machines to artificially cause long waits, all of which are documented dirty tricks that republicans have done in Florida and Ohio, capital i.e. death penalty offenses. You can do a google search of the last 2 presidential elections and find the documentation. I think fingerprinting your ballot and the voter roll should be sufficient for ID and aid in the conviction of violators. I can make a case on google alone that vote fraud by the last 2 means I listed are bigger problems and therefore should have priority, but why not satisfy everyone and do it all in one bill? As yet no one has responded to these points, I can only assume because they know what a farce it would be to argue against.

It would seem that if you can get them to the polls to vote you could also get them to a place to get a valid photo ID
LS

Rich Brown

I am all for Voter ID, but sir, fingerprints? Hell, why not take DNA then?
No one is fingerprinted unless there are good reasons to do so.

Why not give voters a test to see if they are up on the issues before each election? God knows, if you only read the PD and listen to ABC, CBS, and NBC, you only get the liberal side of an issue. If voters were really informed, the dems would never win an election.

JD,

If we can make Iraqis show a purple finger as part of their voter identification why can’t we? Aren’t we as good as Iraqis? Ink pads are much cheaper than getting a copy of your birth certificate. Fingerprints would most likely be harder counterfeit to foil a scanner. Questions of ballot stuffing would be resolved by running the prints to see if they were used on more than one ballot and help identify and prosecute the illegal voter, unless of course Bush commutes his sentence or pardons him. Giving voters a current events test wouldn’t be constitutional, but then Bush et al, has already shredded that document so I would expect that kind of suggestion from a GOPer.

Rich Brown

I was just joking about taking a test, and I am not a GOP’er. I am a conservative. I just thought a test was about as funny as fingerprints.

Do you relize how long it would take to run fingerprints from a national election? It would take longer than Gore’s lawsuits back in 2000.

I guess when someone turns 18, and registers to vote, they would be fingerprinted, so they could be compared to the ballots. Wow, that would cost an arm and a leg.

JD,

By the way the ACORN stuff was a problem, but no evidence was brought forth that it was a deliberate attempt to cheat an election. In Mo. roughly 3000 voter registrations were filled out that didn’t meet standards. Many were incomplete, or had inaccurate info, the reports don’t indicate the precentage of those 2 categories, but it was probably pretty high. The newspapers reported 2 specific incidents where the signee filled out multiple cards, and where a card bearing the name of a dead person was turned in. Those working for ACORN claimed they were under pressure to fill a quota of new registrations from ACORN, not trying to sway an election. So blaming that for fixing elections is a pretty far stretch especially compared to republican election theft by dirty tricks. I personally have worked in voter registration drives for Rock the Vote, and another organization (it might have been Move On). We registered both Democrats and republicans without regard for party affiliation. Sometimes the registrant requested to turn in the cards themselves, so we weren’t always there to see if they filled it out properly. In any event fingerprints would still be a more secure way of verifying ID. Refusing a breathalizer test, failure to stop for a spot road block, and numerous other intrusions, (though not random DNA sampling as yet) have passed constitutional muster in the past.

And if you must persist in advancing the zombie idea that the media has a liberal bias, then I must point out to you that conservative bias is far more likely given the ownership of most of the newspapers in the country, given the amount of bandwidth in radio and tv and cable stations that carry Rush, Hannity, Fox affiliates, Glenn Beck, the fringe Bible literalists, and pundits to vile to mention. Take a cruise up and down the dial and count the number of conservatives to liberal you run into. I’d be surprised if it wasn’t at least 4 to 1 your favor on FM, worse on AM, 3 to 1 on satellite. Hell you even bullied the Post-Dispatch into running Jonah Goldberg, George Will, Colleen Carol Campbell, and other neo-con spawn on a regular basis. God knows why! Then you have the gall to complain about liberal bias. That’s one heckuva job yer doin Brownie.

Lastly, yes if every ballot was run through a fingerprint machine it would probably be a fairly high cost for a national election, but since only the people who voted Democratic would be challenged then you could knock off a significant but smaller than 50 percentage of the ballots. Since republicans have been throwing away billions down the black hole of Iraqi, a lot of that would be made up by the saving from Democrats pulling us out of there.