On May 24 every Democratic Senator voted against an amendment proposed by Senator Mitch McConnell (R, KY) to the immigration bill then being debated in the Senate, an amendment which would have required a photo ID to vote at the polls in federal elections. According to John Fund in OpinionJournal’s Political Diary, Barack Obama (D, IL), for one, said that the proposal was not necessary because voter fraud was not a problem in the United States. (Somebody needs to explain to Barack, trusting person that he is, that "vote early, vote often" did not originate with computer voting for baseball's All Star Game.)
An aside: Democrats oppose the photo ID requirement because, they say, it imposes too much of a burden on voters, especially, apparently, their voters. I can never understand why people continue to vote Democratic when the Democrats in Washington are saying they are too dumb or too lazy or too unmotivated to even get a photo ID to vote. But back to my main point.
While I think a photo ID requirement is an excellent idea (especially since the motor voter rules were pushed through by President Clinton and the Democrats in the 1990s), there is an even bigger concern coming down the road: the huge increase in voting by mail and voting in advance of election day. It used to be it was just people who were going to be out of town on election day or who physically could not get to the polls who voted absentee. Now, however, it is just a matter of voting early for convenience.
There are several problems with this trend. First, if you vote early, you do not have the value of the full campaign before you vote. While you might say that this should be the individual voter's choice, I think it may be appropriate for government to say that it has an interest in making sure people hear the whole campaign before voting, except where it cannot be avoided. Also, if it is the voter's choice, why cannot I be allowed to sign up to vote Republican in every election until I say otherwise? It is what I am going to do, so why not let me cast advance votes right now for a whole bunch of elections?
Second, proponents of advance voting claim that it will increase turnout, but I doubt that is true. Oregon does all of its voting by mail, and the turnout there has not seemed to increase. In fact, there is something to be said for the excitement of a single big day for voting to get people out to vote. Also, there is the unifying effect of everybody nationwide voting on the same day
The main problem with advance voting, however, is the damage it can do to the legitimacy of our election process. When you vote on election day at a polling place, the process is pretty simple and the procedure is fairly secure. (See, however, my concerns about ballot secrecy even in a polling place.) You vote and at the end of the day the election judges count the ballots cast there, with possibly a few absentee votes thrown in. Advance votes, on the other hand, have to be handled many more times. You fill out your ballot and mail it in. All of the advance votes have to be collected and stored. Then, just before election day, they must be divided up by precinct and on election day sent to the right precinct to be counted. At every point in this process, there is a chance for mistakes or incompetence (or fraud) to lose ballots or misplace them. Then, once the absentee ballots and advance votes are at the precinct, they require special handling after the polls have closed and the judges are tired from a long day. A few absentee or advance votes are not a big deal at your average polling place. But if you start increasing the number of them significantly, there is a big increase in the burden on election judges who are already overburdened. Being an election judge is not an easy job. It is a long day, and with all the new rules and procedures for things such as provisional ballots, etc., it is getting increasingly complicated. With so few people able or willing to serve as election judges, asking even more of those who are willing to do the job is not a good idea. The possibilities for mistakes increase with every new procedure or complication that is added. The potential for fraud increases even more. No longer is it just places like Illinois (you really do need to read up on the history of Chicago elections, Barack) where you have to be concerned. Election laws are now being violated all over, in places where you would have previously thought people were more honest.
In other words, if you think Florida was bad in 2000, take Florida with all of the bitterness and distrust it generated and add to it the incompetence or fraud, or both, in King County during the Washington gubernatorial race in 2004, where uncounted ballots were being found here, there, and everywhere until finally all the votes were counted or the Democrat won (depending on your point of view). Take the sum of those two elections and multiply them by the partisanship and divisiveness evidenced by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s article in Rolling Stone claiming that Bush stole Ohio in 2004, and you can get an idea of what our elections could turn into. (Another aside: I find it fascinating that in 1960 Richard Nixon lost to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s uncle by fewer votes nationwide than Kerry lost to Bush in just Ohio, and yet it is Kennedy who is claiming the election was stolen.)
This is not the direction we should be going. Instead of making fraud easier, mistakes more likely, and refusal to accept results more frequent, we need to be moving toward a system that is simple, secure, and clearly honest, a system that will give us results that are accepted and respected. Advance voting will do none of these.
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