This is my response to our troll from this morning. Remember kids: Don't feed the trolls!
I don't understand how, in the high-tech modern society that we have now, there isn't a simple, cheap solution to the government ID problem. No American should have to: take time off of work, travel to distant offices between a set of hours (and always business hours), pay fines, produce documents (that require fines to get copies of), etc. for what? An "official" card with a picture on it? The current process for getting a state-issued photo ID is ridiculous!
There are ways that the federal government can fix this, without costing any citizens' time or money, as long as the initial investment is spent on the technology. Follow me under the fold for my "ID" plan.
Why not have IDs provided at BIRTH?
This seems easy enough. When a child is born in this country, hospital officials have a little required paperwork to do in the form of a birth certificate. Once that birth certificate is issued, presumably the federal government now has that child's name and SS # logged in a database somewhere...
It would be stupid easy for a computer program to be written that, lets say weekly, checks the database for persons who have turned 18 since the last check. All of the positive matches get ID cards produced, and then our new citizens are contacted via mail, phone, TXT, and email to get a current mailing address to mail out their brand-new, federal government approved, ID card.
How much money would it cost to write such a program? Not much at all! A college graduate with a CS degree can write a tiny Visual Basic/C++/C#/whatever piece of code that runs a query like this (paraphrased):
Select *
from [Citizens DB table]
where
Age >= 18
and
SSID not in (select SSID from Citizens_Already_Registered)
The program or form that is used to input birth certificate information would need a minor update, but that wouldn't require any herculean programming either. The big upfront cost will be for the hardware, server & DB software, and maintenance. Still, we're not looking at anything past several million dollars per year at the most to implement such a simple ID system.
Major corporations do this already with SQL/Oracle/other DB tables that have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of records already. If Amazon, eBay, and Facebook can handle databases with hundreds of millions of records, so can the government.
The voter pays NOTHING past the initial implementation. The government KNOWS that the people on this database are citizens, because they were born here. The only people that this does not cover would be non-birth citizens, i.e. immigrants. I believe that there already is a process in place in which legal immigrants can also get an ID card from the states, and if necessary I could see the federal government extending a national ID card to immigrants as part of the immigration process.
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What about a biometric voter identification system?
I'm talking about fingerprint readers here. They're cheap enough now that some businesses use them for various purposes, and using these connected with a national voter database that checks whether the citizen has voted already would virtually eliminate any possibility of duplicate voters.
You can use similar basic DB code like with the birth database, except that this time the database will just contain dates that the person has voted that ties into the fingerprint.
Last, but not least...
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I want to see a national standard model voting machine that records all of the votes into a database.
Yes, I'm on a database-loving streak. I really think that smart use of enterprise-level database systems can make our voting system better for everyone involved.
Imagine if, in the 2000 election, all of the FL votes were tabulated in a machine that added the votes to a FL election votes database. Each record contained the voter's SS #, plus the choices that he or she made on the ballot. The voters, instead of being concerned that "hanging chads" invalidated their votes, got a text message, email, automated phone call, etc. telling them that their vote was processed and what their vote was entered as. If there was an issue or a hanging chad that resulted in an error, the voter would have known immediately and would have been able to see a poll worker to correct the issue right then and there. The recounts would have also been incredibly easy, not to mention verifiable thanks to all of the feedback that each voter received assuring them that their vote was accurately entered into the votes database...
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What could go wrong?
The biggest concern with this database-centric approach is that the system can be breached, manipulated, spoofed, or otherwise disrupted by black hat hackers or political saboteurs. I fathom that a major cost in designing a database system for the federal government would be with the secure storage of this data. It is certainly possible, since classified FBI, CIA, and other documents are currently safe from the wrong sets of eyes. If those sensitive documents can stay protected, then I have faith in the government to have strong protection for these items as well.
Can a birth certificate or fingerprint be spoofed? Certainly. This is a physical security issue, and I would need to do some research as to what steps could be taken at physical voting locations to prevent someone from "wearing" someone else's fingerprints, for example.
There could also be data integrity issues. The last thing I want to see happen is for a system like this to be put in place, but a program error keeps a group of people from voting by pulling up false positives on the fingerprint check. There would need to be fail safes available if this occurred, or absentee ballots available at the very least to disenfranchised voters.