A non-invasive alternative to voter id: on-site photo signatures
I just had a thought about voter id. The fact that you voted is public information. The list of people who voted is out there and available to anyone who wants to look. When you vote, you sign in where your name is, and that sign-in sheet is public.
Someone who votes in your name isn’t likely to get caught, because signatures aren’t traceable. But if the fact that you voted is public information, why not require a “photo signature” in addition to the written signature? Digital cameras are cheap nowadays, certainly compared to the more and more complex voting process. Why not take a photo with each signature, and allow campaigns to identify people who were voting under a name not their own?
Vote fraud is rarely prosecuted today and everyone knows it. It is easy enough to get a list of names that never vote, and impossible to police stealing votes under those names. That’s because it is impossible to positively identify the fraudulent voter in order to prosecute them for their crime.
A photo signature would change that. It would be a fairly simple technique that would make vote fraud more complex rather than making the policing of vote fraud complex. We would then have positive proof that vote fraud occurred and a photo of who committed it.
This would probably have the effect of moving most fraud to absentee balloting; ubiquitous absentee balloting is a fraud problem on its own.
In response to You don’t need papers to vote: No, you do not need papers to vote. You just need to walk in and know someone’s name.
- How Does Requiring a Voter ID Prevent Election Fraud?
- “Given the incidence of voter fraud—and the simplicity of requiring voters to present a valid ID in order to be able to vote—it’s not surprising that 70 percent of likely U.S. voters believe that voters ‘should be required to show photo identification such as a driver’s license before being allowed to cast their ballot.’”
- Policy Brief on Alternatives to Voter Identification
- The procedures suggested here by the Brennan Center focus on fraudulent voter registrations, not on fraudulent votes (and seem to want to implement only procedures that are easy to bypass).
More vote fraud
- Who is Trump running against?
- If Trump runs against Biden, he’ll lose, just like he did in 2020: by getting more votes but fewer ballots. It looks like Trump understands that. He’s not running against Biden. He’s running against the Democrats and Republicans who put Biden in power.
- Bean counting and ballot counting
- We treat money far more seriously than we treat the future of our country.
- 2020: The Dark Joke Returns
- It’s long past time to do something about the dark jokes we make about corruption among the beltway class.
- The Silver Blaze Media and the Gaslight Election
- This isn’t just the Gaslight election, it’s the Silver Blaze election.
- The Post Office is not designed for universal mail-in ballots
- Universal mail-in ballots introduce serious problems that the United States Postal Service is not designed to handle. To be sure that all votes are counted, we should continue accepting ballots for 100 years.
- Three more pages with the topic vote fraud, and other related pages
That's an interesting thought. Even more effective for catching fraudulent voters might be thumbprint, since we have a more mature system in place for tracing them. Though if you've passed through customs lately, you'll see that even modern thumbprint readers can really slow down a queue.
But whatever the mechanism, I think you're right that something traceable to the person who cast the vote would be a big help. Off the top of my head I can't think of anything other than biometric data that could be used.
Also, a simple way for individuals to look at the places they were purported to vote so they could say "that's not me!" could help. Though the demographic who doesn't vote is probably also the demographic unlikely to check.
I could imagine in areas where fraud is rife, volunteer canaries could intentionally not vote, to try to smoke out fraud. An electoral project honey pot.
Other Jerry at 8:56 p.m. November 11th, 2012
15wAa
Yeah, what I like about the photo option is that it makes it easy for friends, family, even a neighborhood partisan volunteer, to look for fraud. Humans are extremely good at recognizing people.
Attempts to do immediate biometric rejections, such as with thumbprints, are likely to really slow down voting and run the risk of false rejections. Unless the reliability of biometric detection systems were extremely high, false rejections would probably outweigh valid rejections due to the large population involved.
Jerry Stratton in San Diego at 10:08 a.m. November 12th, 2012
3eqBR