As with all politics, there’s always tomorrow. Here’s what I think are essential things to consider in the near future.
- Fighting for a uniform, reliable, auditable voting system. My first thought is that this requires both a reliable voter identification scheme and paper ballots. I’m trying to think of a way to have that without a national ID.
- Not just preventing the D’s from re-imposing the Fairness Doctrine (let me remind you all again of unfairdoctrine.org) but eliminating the McCain-Feingold speech restrictions. [1]
- Changing the election finance laws to require all donations, of whatever amount, to be submitted through a mechanism with complete transparency; illegal donations should be a serious felony, and a pattern of illegal donations should be subject to treble damages and criminal sanctions on the CFO of the campaign.
I solicit other suggestions.
Footnotes:- Chuck Schumer suggested that if the government can restrict porn, it can restrict Rush Limbaugh. I think I agree; since it’s clear under the First Amendment that Limbaugh can’t be restricted, it follows that porn laws are questionable too. [↩]
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I’m trying to think of a way to have that without a national ID.
Biometrics? (Not to identify the voter as eligible, but to keep one voter from casting multiple ballots.) Although that breaks down in the case of voting by mail.
If you go the ID route, what’s wrong with driver’s licenses/IDs? They’re issued by the state, and even “national” elections are actually conducted by the state. They are forgeable, but a national ID – or any ID – will also have that problem.
I actually think it might be better to verify voter status at the registration stage than try to do it at the polling place (other than in a rudimentary way such as flashing a state ID or being vouched for by a poll worker). For one thing, there’s less time pressure (and less need for necessary hacks such as provisional ballots) when it’s done at the earlier stage. For another, it seems that there are more problems with fake registrations than with fake ballots.
Biometric ID doesn’t help us prevent multiple voting, necessarily, although it might help us try multiple-voters. On the other hand, social security numbers might actually be workable; all that’s really needed is a table that has SSAN as the key, one bit for “registered to vote” and one bit for “has voted”. Then at least you can keep it to one vote per person — after the bit is flipped once, all succeeding votes are discarded.
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