Identification Of Voters, Is It Necessary?

Let me begin with HELL YES, and if you disagree, why? Identification is needed for almost everything in today’s world. You can’t get a passport, fishing license or hotel room without one, or any of the instances this image shows either.

I’m sure there are plenty others but I think the point is clear.  Hopefully you believe that electing the person who will be in charge of this country for 4 to 8 years is as important as buying a bottle of Mad Dog and a pack of Pall Malls.

There are 49 states that require no copy of your identification included with an absentee ballot. Forty states  have no notary or witness signatures on return envelope required. Now many of these states have other requirements that do require identification when applying for an absentee ballot although others simply require signing an oath and others that notify voters that they sign under penalty of perjury. If you’d like to see what the requirements are for your state you can click this link to the National Council of State Legislatures to read those.

It seems to me that if you were required to enclose a copy of your identification it would take quite a bit of the guesswork out of determining if a signature on a ballot was valid.  Most verifications are made by election workers of the signature on a ballot to the signature on a voter’s file. That seems like it would be fairly time consuming when compared to checking the signature on the ballot to one on an enclosed identification copy; not only time consuming but more likely to result in error or indecision.  But what do I know?

I know that if you think people don’t need to show identification to vote, in person or absentee, when they need to for practically everything else, you’re not really concerned about the integrity of the whole voting process, and that, I think, is a shame.

I originally set out to make a meme, but as is often the case with me, I got sidetracked and ended up here writing this.  The following is what set me on the path.

Every time a credit card transaction requires an electronic signature from me I just scribble something barely legible and it’s always accepted.  Never say I don’t finish what I set out to do.

One Comment

  1. Voter ID? Sure, and it should be issued ONLY to those who can AT LEAST pass a simple, easy-peasy quiz taken from the questions from which the citizenship quiz is derived for those who seek naturalization. 10 questions taken from the pool of questions AVAILABLE ONLINE OR IN PRINT for study (even though any eighth grade kid who can’t pass the citizenship quiz w/o study should be shamed and ostracized). Anyone who can’t pass such a quiz is either too stupid or lazy (or both) to be trusted with the responsibility of a vote.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *