Iowa Voters

Ballot box guardians often allege that nonexistent people are signing up to vote and may be stealing elections. They cite cases of voter drives that register Ronald McDonald, Donald Duck, Donald Trump, and maybe a pet or two. They are correct that this actually happens. However, they get the analysis wrong.

These shenanigans could be curtailed by same day registration, but that is a post for another season. Let’s just consider whether we must card every voter in order to catch phony registrations.

To register in Iowa you must reveal your driver’s license number or the last four digits of your social security number. That is enough to prevent duplicate attempts to register and enough to establish your identity. So the cartoon characters and the pets and the con artists would all get weeded out at the registration desk. No phantoms will even advance to the polls.

There is a subset of phantoms that arose after the 1993 Motor Voter Act. That law halted the practice of purging the registration rolls. Prior to 1993 many states demanded voters actually vote every once in a while or be removed from the roles. Unfortunately they never notified people that they were being dropped.

Now they can’t be dropped–even if they move away. So some election guardians fear the imposters will show up pretending to be these long departed folks and will cast ballots for them. These imposters will be foiled.

While few people tell the auditor that they are moving, nearly everyone tells the Postmaster. Iowa voters who leave a forwarding address cannot be dropped from the voting rolls, but they get put on a list of inactive voters. If they (or their imposters) show up at the polls, Iowa law requires them to produce an ID.

So this is already covered, hopefully to Jacobs’s satisfaction. There is no need to require ID cards from everyone on the pretext of defending election integrity. Meanwhile there is a serious need to require paper ballots from every voting system. And a few other things, too, like open source software and random audits of the process.

If you know a way to impersonate a voter, tell me about it in the comment section.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 14th, 2006 at 10:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.