Archive for November 17th, 2006

One of the difficulties I have with some types of “protection” from acts of legislation is that they have the effect of infantilazing the people whom they’re purporting to help.  Case in point:  all this hand-wrangling over laws requiring voters to carry state-issued ID.  According to The Hill, now that the Legislative Branch has changed hands, that whole project is pretty much a dead duck at the federal level, as it has been at the state level.  If the people don’t want to carry ID’s and vote the idea down, I guess that’s up to them, but I’ll be dogged if I can figure out why it shouldn’t be a law. 

Critics have consistently claimed that such laws would disproportionately affect poor and minority communities whose members are less likely to have government-issued ID, such as passports or drivers licenses, or be able to afford them if they had to purchase them.

It would be different if the proposed laws were requiring voters to have a special ID card with which to vote.  Then I could see some resistance. Shoot, I would probably be against that, myself.  Who wants to carry around a whole bunch of unnecessary cards and whatnot?  What possible argument could there be against using the Driver’s License, though?  Wasn’t it not too long ago that the push was to allow people to register when they get their licenses? 

See, I think this boils down to the question of rights versus responsibilities.  Yes, voting is a right, but along with it must come some requisite responsibilities.  I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having some expectations of voters.  I mean, yeah, we want people to be free to vote and we don’t wanna make restrictions that inhibit any portion of the populace, but come on.  I could’ve walked into the booth and voted regardless of the fact that I barely knew who was running and what they stood for.  Nobody’s checking.  In fact, my guess is that both parties would rather that I blindly vote for their brand instead of selecting each candidate.  Either way, since we don’t require voters to actually know anything about what or who they’re voting for, they should at least be have to have some form of identification. I mean, for real.  You tryin’a tell me it’s okay to mandate ID to buy alcohol, but it’s not okay to mandate ID for me to vote?