Supreme Court Rules On Voting Law
April 28, 2008
The Supreme Court ruled today on a voting law in Indiana that requires voters to show proof of identification before being allowed to vote. I watched an interesting spin on the story by CNN. The slant detailed their belief that this hurts the democratic party by preventing poorer voters from their constitutional right to vote.
My question is simple….how does it accomplish this? Shouldn’t all citizens have some form of id.?
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4 Responses to “Supreme Court Rules On Voting Law”
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If it is too much trouble for you to get an ID, you probably arent showing up to vote anyways.
Ben - agreed. If someone can’t get a proper form of identification, maybe they shouldn’t be voting anyway.
I guess I just have never seen what the big deal is about proving who you are to vote. Is it really that difficult?
I’ve been a pollworker since the Nov 04 election. One challenge (for both the pollworkers and the voters) is that the identification rules keep changing - often in the 1-2 week interval between when poll workers are trained and the election takes place!
But no, it’s not hard to establish identity at the polls. If you are registered, then your name and address is in the Poll Signature Book. To establish that you are who you say you are, all you need to bring with you is something as simple as a utility bill which has you name and the address as shown in the Signature Poll Book.
If you have no identification whatsoever, you can still vote on Election Day on a Provisional Ballot, but you have I think 10 days to appear at the Board of Elections with appropriate ID else your vote will be voided.
Ohio’s ID system isn’t perfect. I could swipe a utility bill off the counter of a friend I know isn’t going to vote, and easily represent myself as that person at the polls by presenting the stolen utility bill. As long as the signature is close to that displayed in the book (and it’s right there for me to copy), the pollworker would have no reason to doubt that I am who I claim to be.
In these days of scanners and digital editing software, I could even counterfeit a utility bill for someone I don’t think is going to vote.
All of us want a voting process which is impossible to manipulate. The truth is that all we can do is talk in propabilities. Even if we used fingerprints or retina scans to authenticate identity, there is a non-zero chance of beating the system.
While we don’t want to admit it, the real situation is that we are willing to pay only so much for security in our voting systems. And it’s not just money I’m talking about - it’s also inconvenience. We actually had a lady in our polling location last March stand in front of us tapping her feet and rolling her eyes saying “I’m waiiiting…” while we checked her in,,,