The voter ID debate should not even be a debate in a
democracy. The idea of having a democracy is that everyone votes, which means there
should be no barriers to voting. Republicans
create an impediment to voting to prevent a segment of the population from
voting. Their argument is that they are trying to do the right thing and
prevent voter fraud. They have generated a list of ways people could vote
illegally; principle among the reason are double voting at different polling
place and using dead people names to cast more than one ballot. The truth of
voter fraud is that there is very, very little—certainly never enough to sway
an election, which reasonable people would expect electoral boards would detect
immediately.
Experience with the Republican mindset has taught me that
when they say there is fraud it is a red herring. There is fraud and they are
the ones doing it. However, there is reason to believe there is undetected fraud
in elections. Let me digress for a minute. Republicans have a strange quirk in
their thinking; when the commit a criminal act they want it to appear to be
legal. A reference to states controlled by Republican governors provides us
with a lexicon of such misdeeds. For example, a Republican governor will fire
the state utility commission, which is there to protect the citizens of the
state from fraudulent manipulation of utility rates, and appoint a Republican majority
to the commission that will approve the rates. Forever after, the commission increased
the rates were according to state law. The same thing happens with appointed electoral
boards, as cited in the news coming out of Pennsylvania before the last presidential
election. The ease of detection of voter fraud is easy if all you have to do is
check voters name against obituary lists but even that is difficult when you
the culprit in charge of elections, it is not possible because it is just not
done.
In several elections, there were challenges to the veracity
of vote counts resulting form programmed electronic voting. Republican controlled
businesses manufactured the voting machines and republican programmers wrote
the programs. How could honest officials detect such methods of fraud? I distinctly
remember the election night when major net works declared Al Gore the winner in
Florida and the suddenly George W. Bush was declared the winner—it was actually
more complex then that but for our purpose here that is sufficient. The news networks
depended on regionally analysis of voter turnout, voter trends, etc but also the gold standard at the time were exit
polls. When a person steps out of
the voting booth and is asked how he or she voted, their answers has been
proved to be a accurate reflection of how they actually voted—in contrast to results
of gotten by Republican and Democratic
pollsters days or even weeks before the actual election. The exit polls clearly
indicated Al Gore to be the winner. After the networks declared George Bush the
winner, the chaos we are all familiar with ensued. Exit polls were a technique that
could be used to detect voter fraud; however, since that day, news networks do
not use of exit polls or even mentioned them—a significant conservative victory.
In my state of North Carolina, the Republican legislature
has passed voter ID laws; shorten voting hours and eliminate Sunday voting
(black churches); they will decrease the number of voting machines in minority neighborhoods;
and decrease the availability of driver license office workers to delay issuing
voter ID’s. The law was written by Republicans
to disenfranchise democratic voters—it is a legalized form of voter fraud. This
is another significant Republican victory.
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