<p>I love going to our neighborhood polling place, and think it’s a pity that those who can often don’t. However, there are many people where going out to vote in person on election day is a real inconvenience. Anyone with physical disabilities,the elderly, people working long or multiple shifts, people with numerous small children, anyone who’s ill or who has to travel extensively for work–there are many, many such cases. </p>
<p>In our area, there are fewer and fewer poll workers, and fewer people volunteering their garages or living rooms for election day. That means that polling locations are often further away, which in turn makes it less convenient for people to stroll over and vote, which means more people vote absentee…a vicious circle.</p>
<p>I’m struck by how many people on this thread are suggesting apparently without tongue in cheek biometric data identification. There was a court case in the last few years about taking DNA samples from people who’d been arrested but not necessarily charged or found guilty. This raises big issues about privacy rights, about who has access to this data, about the ability of the government to protect this data. Not to mention how to keep hundreds of millions of DNA samples uncontaminated. From a civil libertarian’s POV, this is a constitutional nightmare. From a pragmatic POV, it sounds like a massive waste of taxpayer dollars if the only purpose is to make the voter rolls tamper proof…which would be done how, anyway? Would every polling place have a DNA sequencer, and trained professionals so that IDs could be verified?</p>
<p>“Would every polling place have a DNA sequencer, and trained professionals so that IDs could be verified?”</p>
<p>No need Slithey. Simply require that three pints be withdrawn from each voter. Each individual will be incapacitated for more than enough time to send out a few cc’s for sequencing and get results back. Side benefit … donate the bulk of the blood to the Red Cross, and take a tax deduction!</p>
<p>PS, You’re correct of course, on all points.</p>
<p>Same kinds of database issues. It’s not going to be possible to check that thumbprint against a massive database in real time. There could be a check later to see if there was some kind of fraud, but then you can’t yank out that one ballot. Or at least you couldn’t do that and keep secret ballots. Again, constitutional issues. </p>
<p>Banks have the thumbprint rule because they’re trying to halt money laundering and other types of criminal behavior. They can post-process the thumbprint because, unlike with ballots, the account and money is tied to a specific biometric marker. And when there’s a hit–a positive ID–there’s a payoff for that, in the form of catching some significant bad guy/gal.</p>
<p>And then the print would have to be checked against a database to validate the voter. And since the little old ladies who staff my polling places probably aren’t skilled in reading fingerprint databases, each polling place would have to have an expert there to interpret. It is inevitable that there will be cases of the machine not being able to verify the print of a legitimate voter, so how would those issues be dealt with? Of course, all of this checking would slow down the process, which will result in some people not voting because they can’t, for whatever reason, stand in line for hours.</p>
<p>In addition to the problem of being time-consuming, how much would it cost to put a sufficient number of database machines in every polling place in America? And as we’ve see before, if technology in a polling place goes wrong, people are disenfranchised. So each polling place would need to have a tech support person in addition to the fingerprint expert. Both would need to be paid, so there’s more expense. </p>
<p>And there’s another problem we’ve seen before with voting technology in poor/minority areas: Things go wrong. There aren’t enough machines, or there are programming errors. They malfunction; they’re rigged or hacked. Oddly, these problems don’t seem to occur so much in rich white areas. See Diebold circa 2004.</p>
<p>It would be interesting to compare the number of fraudulent votes due to lack of photo ID or other measures advocated here to the number of legitimate voters who would be blocked from voting by such measures.</p>
<p>There’s the point of view here that every vote is potentially fraudulent, and then there’s the point of view that fraud is rare. </p>
<p>You are all correct, that screening every voter and his prints at the time of voting would be an onerous task. My assumption, in suggesting a thumb print, is that fraud is rare, but that thumbprints are unique, always with us, and providing them doesn’t require the voter to jump through hoops. </p>
<p>It seems to me, that if the United States decides that it needs to provide a verifiable means of addressing voter identity, it should be done in such a way that the voter is the person who is the least imposed upon… As opposed to requiring the voter to complete a paper chase to acquire a photo ID. And let’s face it, any photo ID can be purchased fraudulently. Ask almost any college student where to get one. I don’t know why anyone assumes that photo IDs are THE answer.</p>