Is sauce for the gander, they say. Applied to transparent elections in the United States, this gets interesting. I earlier argued that all politicians should worry about us tinfoil brigaders distrusting the Diebold machines. Even if the machines are not used fraudulently, the very fact that so many of us now distrust them should be a sufficient reason to put into place more reliable programs and methods. But I've been shouting into a barrel on all that. The people who have already gotten elected (or appear to have been elected) have no purely selfish reason to change the system.
But now I hear the same argument from Republicans:
Advocates of registration and photo identification laws say they are needed to prevent fraud. They say the rules apply to all potential voters, regardless of race, ethnicity, income or ideology. "This is a matter of voter confidence, whether or not the fraud is real or perceived," says Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita, whose state has one of the nation's strictest ID requirements.
Except, of course Rokita is not talking about possible machine fraud, only the idea that dead people might be voting in large numbers. We all know that dead people vote Democratic, for some odd reason. And then there is the difference that most voters who won't have proper identification don't have it because they are poor and poor people usually don't have passports and such. Poor old people also tend not to have drivers' licenses.
I want to strike a deal with people like Rokita. If he promises that the machines will be made tamper-proof, I'm ok with a system where all people are provided identification cards at no cost for them and in places where they can get to easily. How about that?