Voter Registration
Getting voters registered and to the polls on election day are critical to success during any election. In recent years complaints have been raised against both major political parties regarding inappropriate and even fraudulent registration and poll activities. The hottest registration issue revolves around voter ID. The left says it is discriminatory and depresses minority turnout. They attack those who dare to support voter ID laws as “anti-voting rights activists and voter fraud hucksters”. The right says we need to verify that each voter is legal and besides it is nonsense not to have to show an ID in this country to vote ... we do it for much less critical activities (such as, cash a check, drive a car, board an airplane, buy medicine, visit a doctor, get government assistance, etc). So, what is the real issue? Voter registration got a lot of attention during the 2008, 2012, 2014, 2016 & 2018 election season. We expect it will get a lot of attention before and during the 2020 election season.

Is Ensuring Election Integrity Anti-Democratic?

12/20/21
by John R. Lott, Jr., Founder and President, Crime Prevention Research Center
from Hillsdale College- Imprimus,
October, 2021:

Sixteen years ago, in 2005, the Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform issued a report that proposed a uniform system of requiring a photo ID in order to vote in U.S. elections. The report also pointed out that widespread absentee voting makes vote fraud more likely. Voter files contain ineligible, duplicate, fictional, and deceased voters, a fact easily exploited using absentee ballots to commit fraud. Citizens who vote absentee are more susceptible to pressure and intimidation. And vote-buying schemes are far easier when citizens vote by mail.

Who was behind the Carter-Baker Commission? Donald Trump? No. The Commission’s two ranking members were former President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, and former Secretary of State James Baker III, a Republican. Other Democrats on the Commission were former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and former Indiana Congressman Lee Hamilton. It was a truly bipartisan commission that made what seemed at the time to be common sense proposals. How things have changed.

for instance, is President Biden speaking recently in Philadelphia, condemning the idea of voter IDs: “There is an unfolding assault taking place in America today—an attempt to suppress and subvert the right to vote in fair and free elections, an assault on democracy, an assault on liberty, an assault on who we are—who we are as Americans. For, make no mistake, bullies and merchants of fear and peddlers of lies are threatening the very foundation of our country.” Sadly but predicably, he went on to suggest that requiring voter IDs would mean returning people to slavery. But the fact is that the U.S. is an outlier among the world’s democracies in not requiring voter ID. Of the 47 countries in Europe today, 46 of them currently require government-issued photo IDs to vote.

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