RatherBeOnATrain

I'm stunned. There was an actual thought-provoking piece posted at the Huffington Post!

Here's the link:

Debbie Hinds:
Why Is It Harder to Vote Than Fly?
Posted: 02/ 1/2012 3:02 pm

Boggie Dog

Actually the question is backwards. Why is it harder to fly than vote should be the real question.

Why is ID or answering invasive personal questions required to fly? What does having ID prove in regards to security seeing that one will be screened regardless?

Voting is an important part of being a citizen and having to prove that one is in fact the person representing themselves at the polling place seems logical.

However, having purchased an airline ticket is an agreement between an individual, citizen or not, and the airlines. Why is government involved in that transaction in any way, shape or form?

I'm ok with showing I have the right to vote, and I do!

flyinbob

Nothing "thought-provoking" about it. Her original premise is very wrong (a few states require ID to vote, while EVERY time you get near an airplane you need to go through multiple security checks), and in trying to make a case for the "right" to vote without ID being harder than flying she uses only the TSA propaganda site for information.

Most high school teachers would fail her for turning in this report.

Combat Medic

Which is why she writes for the HuffPo

cordelli

The author is an idiot.

To vote, I drive to the school down the road, walk in to the table for streets starting J to T or whatever it is, tell them my address, give my name, show them my license, and am handed a poker chip to get my ballot. It takes less time to do then it does to type.

I don't stand in line. I'm not asked to say my name five times, or any other random questions. Specially trained (hold the laughter) people don't slow the lines down so they can spend more time observing me because they are sure I'm a terrorist. I don't have to go through a box to be scanned or a metal detector. I don't have to take off my shoes, empty my pockets, or put anything into a bin so somebody else can rummage through it. I don't need to wait for somebody in a booth to say it's OK to go to the next stage, don't have to be checked because of random X's on a ginger bread man outline, and don't have to wait for everybody in front of me to do the same. If I happen to be carrying a half finished bottle of diet coke with me when I vote, get this, I can carry it to the booth with me.

I would bet that I can enter my polling place, show my ID and get my ballot, and drop my ballot off in the counting scanner machine in less time than I can get to the scanner at most any airport.

jtodd

^
Another "journalist" who has it all backwards.

Ari

Requiring any form of ID than can't be obtained for free violates the 24th Amendment in my opinion.

With respect to the TSA's alternate procedures, the author of the article is clueless. The TSA "working with you" to verify your identity is just the TSA unsing credit bureaus' identity verification questions to verify your identity. The TSA has more trouble "working with" people who don't have a credit record (i.e. the type of people who don't have any photo ID). They have alternate alternate procedures, but those can cause quite a delay.

ScatterX

She left out the part about being forced to get a sack massage in order to vote. Ummm, wait... that's for flying. My bad. Never mind.

I'm sure Phil we be very glad to hear about the new and improved TSA.

Voter fraud is rarely identified, rarely prosecuted, and rarely results in a conviction. This doesn't mean it isn't a problem. Failure to seriously address this issue in a meaningful way turns what could have been a great report on a serious topic into just another politically biased pile of crapola.

But at least it's easy to fly now!!!

[space reserved for future vomit smiley]

(alt: substitute vomit smiley)

flyinbob

Plus of course you can vote by mail from home in many states. Try clearing airport security from home.

mahohmei

Bingo, and I also agree with you on the 24th Amendment. I will support a card-to-vote requirement _only_ when a mobile photo ID unit will, free of charge, visit you and make you a card. And while we're at it, let's give the pollworkers computers to let them look up photo ID cards to photo-compare voters who don't have their IDs with them at the moment. (FWIW, when I go to vote, I hand them my driver's license, primarily so I don't have to say my name).

My Supervisor of Elections (Leon County, FL) runs his office like a well-oiled machine. To register to vote, I had to prove my name, residency, age, and citizenship, all of which they legitimately need to know to let me vote.

Our county has about 60,000 college students, and while most of them don't vote, if every one of them wanted to register to vote in Leon County and show up at the polls, the SoE wouldn't break a sweat (although some local politicians would start sweating). From what I've read, however, a lot of county SoEs are a lot more hostile towards college students., doing such things as running newspaper ads threatening them with loss of financial aid if they register to vote locally. Or arranging polling stations to be far away from dorms. When I was in college, I knew two people who attempted to vote absentee back to their home counties (Duval and Broward), and they never received their ballots, effectively disenfranchising them.

Obviously, these rogue SoEs are targeting vulnerable voters, i.e., college students who are very young, just moved there, have never registered to vote before, and might have never been told they have the right to register to vote where they live for college.

Who does the TSA target? Vulnerable passengers. Women traveling alone. The elderly. Foreigners with any kind of accent. People who don't "know the system".

When it comes down to it, though, I trust my SoE. He once used a boat to hand-deliver absentee ballots to a flooded neighborhood to let the stranded residents vote. On the flip side, I do not trust the TSA at all, and will assume that every one of them wants to steal from me or just power-trip me.

This once again shows that the TSA is untouchable. While laws passed intentionally to try to disenfranchise voters will generate public outrage, "just ask the 9/11 victims' loved ones how _they_ want the TSA to behave".

Wow...that was a long rant. :-)

seaduck79

+1000

This is a propaganda piece designed to prop up the "Requiring ID to vote disenfranchises voters" crapola of the DNC.

GUWonder

This is a classic example of how relying upon arguing by analogy does not make for a strong, logical argument and that approach to trying to make an argument is better described as leading to logical arguments with conclusions that are unsound/invalid.

That is not to say that demands for government-issued photo ID to vote are any more sensible/senseless than demands for government-issued photo ID to fly, particularly when voting rights and travel rights ought to be considered fundamental rights for all free adult US citizens.

For most of US election history, government-issued photo ID was not requierd of those allowed to vote. And for most of US history, government-issued photo ID was not required to travel domestically. And yet the paranoid control freaks' ID presentation demands just grow and grow and spread to more and more aspects of life in the US.

Combat Medic

Just wondering....does your feelings about ID extend to the purchase of guns?

mahohmei

Politically, I'm extremely liberal. Medicare for All (HR 676). Right to vote for all adult US citizens, even if incarcerated. End the Wars on Drugs and Terror. Restore the 90% top bracket on unearned income. Neutral foreign policy. My favorite Member of Congress is Bernie Sanders. For 2012, I plan on voting for Ron Paul, or if he's not on the ballot, the Green or Socialist party candidate. I've been known to vote for Democrats, but I'm not faithful to the Democratic Party, and I'm not a registered Democratic voter, despite being in a closed-primary state.

Despite this, I'm no fan of gun control. Part of this is because of the Second Amendment. The other part is that I see gun control as a wedge issue (designed to divide voters into two groups, thus diluting the viability of third parties), and also as a red herring to disguise what I consider the real cause of our high crime rates: the War on Drugs. If you are the victim of a robbery at gunpoint, chances are the robber is a drug addict looking for money for their next "fix".

That having been said, I also value property rights and local control. If your employer wants to allow parking on their property, but not allow you to store a firearm locked in your car on their property, that's fine with me. If a university wants to disallow firearms in campus housing, fine with me.

StanSimmons

Even a State University running primarily on tax dollars?