Quote (thundercock @ Oct 27 2014 07:01pm)
Sure, call it photo ID. Regardless, many European, South American, and Asian countries have it (for good reason). The fact that I can literally go to any precinct in California, look at the list of voters, and say "yea, I'm that guy" shows that the system can be exploited. Some form of tamper proof identification is necessary. For that tiny minority that don't have a Social Security card, Driver's license, birth certificate, etc. give it to them for free. This really isn't that hard.
I really don't see why I couldn't swipe my driver's license, passport, etc. and have my personal ballot pop up on a screen. If you gave me a link to the CA voter registration database, I could design the system in a fucking day. It really is a trivial task.
But you can't do that. You're still going to need to know which polling place that "random guy" is supposed to go to in order to vote, and know the valid address, and will still need the name to be in the roster of voters in the first place. There are other things too that depend on the state, but you get the point. This "herp fucking derp, look how easy it is to exploit the system" nonsense is exactly why everyone laughs off the morons who are pushing these voter ID laws and their trumped-up concerns. You've got to deal within the confines of reality here.
I agree that it's not hard to modernize the process and make it better. As I've pointed out to you many times, the problem is that we're not even able to have that discussion in this country yet because this nonsense is still dominating the discussion, all because we need to coddle insecure Republicans who can't reliably compete in elections any longer. We can look to certain states for options on how to move forward but unfortunately our progress is predictably confined to states with large Democratic majorities who are trying to get this done, and even after they're able to enact sensible reform we all have to sit through another one of Megyn Kelly's Fox News Fantasy Land rants about how there's widespread "fraud" that we never get any real evidence of. At worst we get absolutely nothing, at best we get "studies" (pause for laughter) like this.