These UN monitors may be onto something.
The most often noted difference between American elections among the visitors was that in most U.S. states, voters need no identification. Voters can also vote by mail, sometimes online, and there’s often no way to know if one person has voted several times under different names, unlike in some Arab countries, where voters ink their fingers when casting their ballots.
The international visitors also noted that there’s no police at U.S. polling stations. In foreign countries, police at polling places are viewed as signs of security; in the United States they are sometimes seen as intimidating.
What’s even more shocking is that we can’t get voter photo ID implemented despite strong legislative majorities passing it into law, and strong majorities of the American people supporting it.
– just stand by and let the violence happen.
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
I honestly don’t know why we don’t push for the inked-finger policy. There is NO POSSIBLE WAY to spin that as “voter suppression” because it doesn’t cost anything to poke your finger in an ink jar. It might be imperfect but it would at least go a long way toward preventing people from voting more than once.
That we are even talking about this is crazy. One useful thing that could be done if Romney wins is set aside a multi-million dollar bounty to any organization or group that can come up with a bulletproof way to vote online, plus ensure that each voter that votes in person only gets one vote.
At the very least every American citizen with a SSN should be able to log into a secure database of some sort and see their ballot so they are assured a) the ballot was turned in with the choices they made at the ballot box b) no tampering was done to the ballot after it left their view and c) no one else voted for them.
I’m not familiar with ink other than what I’ve seen on news over in Iraq when they voted, but I have no doubt that American criminals would find a way to clean the ink off in record time so they can re-vote. Ink also doesn’t address early voting.
There must be some advantage for Republicans to allow some grey areas in the voting process. Otherwise, they would have made more effort to fix this in the past when they controlled all the levers of power.
Reply to self: We turn in very private tax/financial information via 3rd parties such as TurboTax/Intuit, etc when we file state and Federal taxes using their online systems. There is no reason we can’t file our voter choices in the same fashion, with the same security, and the same speed.
This would alleviate all need for absentee ballots, overseas military voters would not be forgotten, and it would make voter tampering an order of magnitude more difficult (it will never be impossible I’m afraid to say).
Still need to protect those with no internet access or that just prefer to walk into a polling place to cast their ballot but come on, this isn’t rocket science!
There is no advantate to Republicans; Democrats have a monopoly on voter fraud and it is largely confined to places controlled by Democrats, e.g., doughnut cities, blue states, some rural counties in The South.
Voter ID and voting qualifications are a state matter but with federal Constitutional implications and in some Southern states and states with large Indian populations election processes are under federal supervision. Democrats do everything they can to make it easier to vote early and often with early voting, unrestricted absentee voting, same day registration – a prescription for fraud, no or minimal residency requirements or verification. When Republicans try to restrict these things, Democrats and their race pimp allies scream bloody murder because even in red and purple states, honest voting reduces the Democrats’ ability to overwhelm the sane vote in the suburbs and rural areas with fraudulent votes in the cities. The best current example is the cesspool called Philadephia which is used to manufacture votes to overcome the vote of the sane areas of Pennsylvania. Likewise, Atlanta, Charlotte/Asheville, and New Orleans perform the same functions in their states.
The baby was thrown out with the bathwater in eliminating residency requirements and verification. Motor voter has resulted in some people being registered every time they come in contact with government so lists are very dirty and cannot be purged. If a Democrat apparatchik has a list of people s/he knows do not live in the district, s/he can just give that name to one of the boys and girls in the van and they can go in and vote as that person. College students and snowbirds can vote in at least two places; one in person and one absentee. We should go back to one-year residency requirements for state and local elections at least, the USSC says thirty days is the limit for federal elections. We should also require that federal employees including active military vote absentee at their original residence and not be able to establish residency since the nature of their work is such that they cannot maintain an intent to remain a resident and many are actually domiciled in federal facilities. If you live in the West, federal civilian employees are like an occupying army and needless to say many of them don’t share the local residents’ folkways and mores. And the single most important thing we should do is make passing the citizenship test given to naturalizing aliens a condition of voter registration; that will end the Democrat Party.