Missing in all of the hooplah on both sides of the Acorn voter registration issue is the real key question:
Why is any of this complication about over registration necessary at all?
All citizens of age have a constitutional right to vote. Yet we have a 230-year history of PREVENTING large demographics from voting, with obstacles of every sort thrown in the way: sex, race, property ownership, poll taxes, and more.
Why do we not re-think this entire process? Iraq was able to get phenomenal levels of voting with a bottle indelible ink.
When does "voter fraud" occur (as opposed to "voter registration fraud" which is what is going on with Acorn)?
- Non-citizen, dead or underage people are voting?
- People are voting more than once?
- People are voting in the wrong place?
That's it. Lets go back point-by-point.
- Ineligible people? There is little evidence of this one occurring to any significant level in federal elections of late. Dead people are rumored to have voted in Chicago back in the original Daley days. But if you prevent people from voting more than once, the effect of this is gone.
- Voting more than once? Indelible ink, either visible (as in Iraq) or UV-visible (less tacky) would solve this in America as well. Then feeding all voters into a very basic database linking names and addresses for auditing later would provide some after-the-fact verification.
- The wrong place? This is not much of a problem in federal elections. In some states it makes a difference, for instance Jerry Falwell's Liberty University trying to sign up every student as a Virginia resident. In cities it is mainly a precinct problem, getting the correct votes to the correct local officials. Yet, if I show valid evidence that I have lived in the precinct recently (e.g., drivers license, utility bill) whether I live in that precinct at that moment is quite irrelevant if I can only vote once. I could make a much more informed vote in the community I lived in for five years, for instance, rather than the one I moved to more recently.
The bigger crime - MUCH bigger than Acorn - is the assumption that SOME people in this country are not worthy to vote, so we need to block them from the polls.