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September 21, 2005
Photo ID's
Instapundit links to a couple of good posts on the need for photo ID's when voting. Reynolds points out that it is earier to vote without an ID than it is to buy a beer without an ID. Considering that people have an incentive to lie about who they are in order to either illegally buy beer or to illegally vote in someone else's name I think it is obviously why photo ID's are necesarry for clean elecections. Reynold's notes that Jimmy Carter is in favor of photo ID requirements and Carter isn't even that good about making sure the elections he monitors are honest.
Will Wilkinson makes the case for why illegal votes are as bad as legal votes not getting counted:
The strange thing is that the press seems to treat illegitimate votes as a kind of noise, a kind of tolerable if unfortunate democratic static, while intimidated no-shows are a travesty against all that is holy. Yet, and this should be obvious, in terms of the aggregative democratic procedure, an unnoticed illegal vote for one guy (in a two horse race) is EXACTLY EQUIVALENT to scaring off a voter for the other guy.If somebody's dog manages to vote for John Kerry, then, in effect, Velma Thompson (or whomever) failed to vote for that nice man, George W. Bush, even though she tried. Whiskers cancels out Velma. Here's another way to make the same point. Each Bush vote is paired with a Kerry vote and they're both thrown away. The winner is the one who has votes left on the table after all the other guy's votes have been chucked. Pairing legitimate voters with voting felons, dogs, corpses, and Frenchmen has precisely the same effect on the outcome as shooting legitimate voters before they can get in the door of the high school gym.
And because I have not linked to it in a while, here is my updated list of voting reforms. I am thinking about following what has happened in Iraqi voting by adding the requirement that all voters get their finger marked with indellible ink so that they can not vote more than once, although I am not sure how that would work with early voting.
Posted by Pete at September 21, 2005 09:18 AM
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