>>Hmmm, I have a "voter registration card" and I believe that is the case
>>across the USA.
Here in New York, the county sends you a card when you register, which
all but the most anal then lose. I used to be an election inspector,
and I can report that we never asked for the cards, and I can't ever
recall anyone offering one.
The ID process was, basically, voters said who they were, we looked
them up in the book, they signed next to their name and we looked to
see if the signature matched the one on file. When you register the
form requests but does not require info like height, age, and eye
color which was in our book and we also checked if available. In the
event that someone's signature or other info didn't look right, we
could ask for more ID but I can't recall that we ever did. Equally
important, most of the inspectors were retired folks who'd lived in
the area for a long time and knew many of the voters by sight.
The current election system, for all its faults, is the result of two
centuries of effort by people not all of whom were completely stupid,
and has a complex and not always set of features to defend against all
sorts of schemes to corrupt an election. The punch card ballot
happens to be a uniquely bad technology for reasons we all know, but
most of the surrounding infrastructure is old and kludgy but not
broken. We need to keep this in mind when designing something new and
zoomy that's supposed to replace it.
--
John R. Levine, IECC, POB 727, Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 387 6869
[EMAIL PROTECTED], Village Trustee and Sewer Commissioner, http://iecc.com/johnl,
Member, Provisional board, Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail
