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Is A Change in the Voter Registration Process Such a Bad Idea?

Michelle Malkin has a post up about a proposal that was reported on in the LA Times to make voter registration universal; a sort of top down proposal where eligible voters are automatically registered to vote when they become eligible. Funny this issue would come up because we were having a family conversation earlier in the week about this topic. I believe it has some merit.

On Michelle’s blog they see red flags:

Here’s your Monday night water cooler topic: Check out the new drive for universal voter registration. Reader Mark Jackson sent the story link with his comment: “This has vote fraud written all over it.”
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Automatic, mandatory voter registration and tracking strikes me not only as a bureaucratic nightmare, but also ideologically unsound. I’m with John Stossel: Some people just shouldn’t be voting. Leave ‘em alone.

Sorry, I disagree, big time. I can see no sane reason that eligible voters should not be automatically registered to vote.

First off, not every Democrat proposal is rooted in a conspiratorial effort to commit voter fraud. Simply fearing it to be and then shouting it from the top of the mountain is not an argument.

Second, the registration process is already a bureaucratic nightmare. It is stupid, it is fragmented and it is open to all sorts of corrupting influences as we have seen for the last couple of election cycles. Often the rules change from county to county let alone state to state. This can not be solved on a micro level; it is bigger than that.

All the emphasis on voter registration and all the various challenges are silly distractions when voters should be concentrating on issues.Too many lawyers, special interests and activist judges are involved. We need to get all of them out of the system and bring sanity back to this process.

Quite frankly this nation has evolved technically to allow for a more consistent approach.

As someone said before, we do it with social security. Even your drivers licenses are all computerized, get a ticket in one state and the cop can scan the back of your card to pull up your information. Shop at Walmart in California and it turns out to be a very similar approach in upstate New York. Uniformity of process is nothing to be scared about.

Personally I believe federal elections should be mandated by consistent standards across the nation. There is no reason to have a punch card system in one precinct and touch screens down the street. If states want to have a different autonomous process for state specific elections fine. National elections have a wider interest.

This does not mean that all polling machines are made by one company or anything like that. But there should be a minimum standard and a uniform regulation where national interests are involved. I am strictly limiting this notion to federal elections. This includes a strict ID requirement for all national elections and perhaps eliminating provisional ballots. You lose your ID, you don’t vote. To combat charges of disenfranchisement we should make it easy to get ID’s to those who need them or bring them to a state facility where they can get one.

As for the argument that some people shouldn’t be voting it is not my right to tell the idiot next door whether or not they should vote. This leave them alone notion is the kind of bullshit rhetoric that actually gets them out voting for the other guys. We need to be smarter than that. Elitist attitudes are what we are fighting within our own party. Where did that get us?

Likewise it is not my job to make it harder for any person to register out of the fear that they will vote. This is a loser approach. Sure, I hope that uninformed idiots stay away from the polls but we shouldn’t be in the job of putting up barriers to make them ineligible.

We can argue about all sorts of things, such as the roll back of early voting or my belief that ballots should all be cast in English. That is a different story and I will be glad to take on those discussions.

As for registration I am all for automatic registration. I would love to hear arguments against.

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