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October 4, 2010
a grand bargain on voting rules
For what other activity would you be required to register and then wait more than a month before actually doing the thing? Today is the last day to register to vote if you live in 17 states and the District of Columbia.* The actual election is in November. In most states, you may only vote within a limited span of hours, at one particular site in your neighborhood.
I mention this because I happened to hear the host and callers on local Boston conservative talk radio expressing astonishment that you don't have to show a photo ID to vote. The tenor of the discussion was a series of rhetorical questions: Would you be able to take money out of a bank without ID? Would you be able to check into a hotel?
Well, maybe: ATMs don't require photo ID, although they do take and store your picture. But certainly there are ATMs all over the place, open 24/7, and ready to use as soon as you put money in the bank. Voting in Massachusetts is possibly easier than other transactions in one respect (no ID is required)--but it is far more difficult in other ways.
I am not personally concerned about voter fraud in the form of people pretending to be other people at the polling place. Doing so would risk a felony conviction, and for what?--to cast a single extra vote for the candidate you prefer hardly seems worth the risk. Lori Minnite found no evidence that it happens.
That said, I'd be willing to enter a grand bargain with the folks I heard on talk radio. Let's make voting really like a secure financial transaction. You'd have to prove who you were, but you could vote at your convenience, 24/7, with no pre-registration or re-registration when you moved.
In fact, this is the roughly deal in some jurisdictions. Twenty-six states offer unrestricted absentee voting. Thirty-one states permit in-person early voting. And nine states offer Election Day registration. Several of these reforms have been found to raise turnout, especially same-day registration. See our fact sheet for a summary.
*Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, DC, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Washington, Wyoming.
October 4, 2010 11:56 AM | category: none
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