Butthole Bandits 7 and a throwback to Jim Crowe

[Lemur]

Actually, this is a partisan dogfight on more than one level. If we were all behaving in good faith, it would look something like this:

1. In-person voting requires photo ID
2. State IDs need to be 100% subsidized, no fees whatsoever, to avoid any possibility of a poll tax. (We just need to eat this cost. There are already documented cases in both WI and PA of low-income voters being told that they need to pay for IDs, even though the state law says for teh poors it's free. Most reliable way to avoid this is make all State ID (excepting commercial and drivers' licenses) free.)
3. All voting machine software need to be open-source (this will help with the well-documented red shift in swing counties, thanks, Diebold!)
4. Mail-in ballots need to be looked over as well, but I've never used one, and I know little about how they work. I do know that almost every documented case of widespread vote fraud that does not involve a vote machine involves mail-in ballots.

Now, of course none of this will happen, because the Dems are operating in bad faith, and the Repubs are operating in atrocious faith. If Repubs actually gave 1/10th as much of a damn as they claim to about voter fraud, they would attack it from the two most commonly known angles: paperless vote machines and mail-in ballots. But they are spending 0% of their effort on either of those.

And if the Dems had any honesty they would concede that an ID is not a ridiculous request for in-person voting, and would instead fight to make IDs widely available for free. That's the tack they should be taking, but they're not. Why? Because they're Dems, and they never miss a chance to miss the point.

I hate to say "a pox on both your houses," but, well, a pox on both your houses. The Repubs are obviously, clearly uninterested in voter fraud, since they are ignoring the most well-documented methods, and instead focusing on in-person voting, which has as close to zero documented cases as you could care to model.

And the Dems, being Dems, just want to keep doing the voter turnout thing they've been doing for decades, and can't imagine changing, because they're Dems.

Manufactured controversy, plain and simple.

If somebody has the testicular fortitude to go after Dieblod, then I might be impressed.

-edit-

Last point: Any changes to voting requirements should be made during non-major-election periods, for obvious reasons. All of this jockeying for position a few months before a presidential cycle is ridiculous.