By WAYNE GREENE Senior Writer on Nov 18, 2008, at 10:17 AM Updated on 11/18 at 10:17 AM
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I got a stronger response to my Sunday column about vote identification cards than I expected.
The last time I looked more than 50 comments had been posted on the story and most of them were on point. I've also gotten several phone calls and people have just walked up to me and brought up the issue. People seem to care about this issue a lot.
Several of the problems people have cited to me in defense of a voter ID system seem like they have simpler solutions.
Two very rational people have contacted me to tell me tales from the 1970s about bizarre voting irregularities in Pittsburg County. One guy told me about dead people still appearing on the voters rolls. Another one told me about an extraordinary number of people being registered at the same address, an apartment building that had only a handful of people actually living in it.
You won't catch me defending the integrity of the voting system in Pittsburg County in the 1970s, but it seems to me that neither problem would be easily solved with a voter ID system. If you would fraudulent register as a dead person, would you hesitate to have an ID card made also?
It seems the better, cheaper and more effective solution is an honest voters roll purge system that is run from the state capitol. The state has databases of death certificates issued in the state, it's wouldn't be difficult to cross reference those with voters rolls in advance of the election. Similarly, the state could check for suspicious patterns, like hundreds of people showing up registered at the same address, for investigation.
A targeted response is going to be much more efficient at finding and eliminating bad registrations, and far less likely to take out any legitimate voters in the process.
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