Dead Men Don't Vote. Well, Not Usually, Anyways. And Only in Important Elections. So Maybe It's a Good Thing.
Glenn Instapundit Reynolds has a col in today's NYPOST that reads in part:
In the United States…only 17 states even require identification in order to vote. Holder & Co., claim that requiring photo ID would be racist, because getting a driver's license, etc., costs money. This claim has consistently been rejected by courts, and with good reason: If requiring photo ID to vote is racist, then what about requiring photo ID to exercise other constitutional rights, like buying a gun?
Of course, the real objection to requiring voter ID isn't based in civil rights, but in civil wrongs. With elections often decided by narrow margins, the ability to produce a few thousand more ballots can often swing the results. (In Minnesota's 2008 disputed US Senate election, won by Al Franken — who proceeded to cast the deciding vote in favor of ObamaCare — the margin of victory was 312, but it turned out that 1,099 votes were cast by felons who were ineligible to vote. Many of them have gone to jail, but Franken has remained in the Senate).
Voter ID makes that kind of trickery harder, which is why political manipulators oppose it.
Voters understand this. According to a Washington Post poll taken earlier this month, 74 percent of Americans support laws requiring voters to show photo identification.
Related: How many dead voters are on the rolls (and hence open to manipulation and fraud)? Politico reports that one in eight voter registrations "is not valid or has significant inaccuracies." Plus:
There also are more than 1.8 million deceased people who still have active registration on voter rolls, Pew [Center on the States] found. And, [Pew's David] Becker said, the outdated, inefficient systems currently in place are "not designed to keep up with deaths as they occur."
I don't think voter fraud is the issue that many right-wingers and left-wingers claim (they call out different issues, but they both seem quick to claim some sort of fakery, from community organizers or Diebold machines or whatever, is at work).
Indeed, the far bigger issue to me is the candidates who are on the ballot and not voters literally have a pulse.
But voter fraud, especially involving clinically dead people—brain dead people, not so much—does seem like a relatively easy issue to address and fix.